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Summer 1994
[Sutnar]
Steven Heller Born in Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Sutnar was a
Ladislav Sutnar pioneer of information design. Working in America
History
in the years after the war he synthesised European
avant-gardisms into a functional commercial
lexicon, made Constructivism playful and used its
geometry to forge the dynamics of catalogue
organisation. ‘The designer must think first, work Buy Eye
later,’ Sutnar declared. His writings — in which the Purchase single issues, back issues or subscribe
bracket was a favourite motif — are as timely online now.
today as his designs.

Ladislav Sutnar’s contributions to information architecture are

milestones, not only in graphic design history, but in the development of
design for the public good. The graphic systems he created for a range of
American businesses clarified and made accessible vast amounts of
complex, usually ponderous, information and transformed routine
business data into digestible units. Before most designers — including the
Swiss rationalists — had focused on the need for information organisation,
Sutnar was in the forefront, driven by the quintessential Modern belief
that good design applied to quotidian products has a beneficial, even
curative, effect on society.

Sutnar emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1939. In the

late 1950s and 1960s he developed a variety of sophisticated design
programmes for America’s telecommunications monopoly, the Bell Popular Feature Articles
System. The parentheses he designed to demarcate American area code Reputations: Gail Bichler
numbers when these were introduced in the early 1960s made the lives of The information graphics
millions of phone users easier, while his distinctive use of functional First Things First Manifesto 2000
typography and stark iconography made public access to both emergency Reputations: Josef Müller-Brockmann
and regular services considerably simpler and provided Bell with a Magic box: craft and the computer
distinctive identity. But in the history of graphic design Saul Bass has
received more attention for his 1968 redesign of the Bell System logo, Feature Categories
which made little impression on the public, than Sutnar did for creating Awards madness
user-friendly telephone directory — an innovation that ‘information- Book design
architect’ Richard Saul Wurman had drawn on in recent years in Design education
developing the California Bell Smart Page directories. Design history
Sutnar is not acknowledged as the designer of the area code parentheses Food design
in part because they were so integral to the layout of the new calling Graphic design
system that they were instantly adopted into the language to become part Illustration
of the vernacular. Moreover, he was never credited by the Bell System Information design
because it was felt that graphic designers, like their own functional Magazines
graphics, should be transparent to the public eye – seen but not heard of. New media
Photography
As impersonal as Sutnar’s solution for indicating area code numbers Posters
might seem, the parentheses were in fact among the many signature Reviews
devices he used to distinguish and highlight various types of information. Type Tuesday
As the art director from 1941 to 1960 of F. W. Dodge’s Sweet’s Catalog Typography
Service, America’s leading producer and distributor of trade and Visual culture
manufacturing catalogues, Sutnar developed an array of typographic and craft
iconographic navigational tools that allowed users to traverse seas of data Design for eating
efficiently. His icons are analogous to the friendly computer symbols in Front matter
use today, and were probably inspired by the iconographic tabs employed Monotype

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by El Lissitzky in Mayakovsky’s 1923 book For the Voice. In addition to Wordless picturebooks
various grid and tab systems, Sutnar made common punctuation, such as
commas, colons and exclamation points, into linguistic traffic signs by
enlarging and repeating them in a manner similar to that of 1920s
Constructivist typography. These were adopted as key components of
Sutnar’s distinctive American style — for although he professed
universality, he nevertheless possessed, and coveted, a graphic personality
that was so distinct from other practising the International Style that his
work did not require a credit line, though he almost always took one. His
personality was based not on self-indulgent styles, however, but on
function (readability, visual interest and flow). It never obscured or
overpowered his clients’ messages, but rather drew attention to them —
which is more than can be said for much of the undisciplined commercial
art of the period.
‘The lack of discipline in our present day urban industrial environment
has produced a visual condition, characterised by clutter, confusion and
chaos,’ wrote Allon Schoener, the curator of the ‘Ladislav Sutnar: Visual
Design in Action’ exhibition originated at the Contemporary Arts Centre
in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1961. ‘As a result the average man of today must
struggle to accomplish such basic objectives as being able to read signs, to
identify products, to digest advertisements, or to locate information in
newspapers... There is an urgent need for communication based upon
precision and clarity. This is the area in which Ladislav Sutnar excels.’

If written today, this statement might seem like a critique of current

design trends, but in 1961 it was a testament to progressivism. In the
1940s, when Sutnar introduced the theoretical constructs that defined
‘good design’, American commercial art was one-third instinct and two-
thirds market convention, with results that were eclectic at best, confused
at worst. Such ad hoc practice was anathema to Sutnar, who was stern
about matters of order and logic and fervently sought to alter visual
standards by introducing both businessmen and commercial artists to ‘the
sound basis for modern graphic design and typography’. This, he asserts
in his book, Visual Design in Action (Hastings House, 1961) is: ‘a direct
heritage of the avant-garde pioneering of the twenties and thirties in
Europe. It represents a basic change that is revolutionary.’

Like Jan Tschichold, Sutnar synthesised European avant-gardisms –

which he said ‘provided the base for further extension of new design
vocabulary and new design means’ – into a functional commercial lexicon
that eschewed ‘formalistic rules or art for art’s sake’. While he modified
aspects of the New Typography, he did not compromise its integrity in the
way that elements of Swiss Neue Grafik became mediocre through
mindless usage overtime. ‘He made Constructivism playful and used
geometry to create the dynamics of organisation,’ says Noel Martin, who
as a young designer in the 1950s was a member of Sutnar’s small circle of
friends and acolytes. Despite a strict belief in absolute rightness of
geometric form, Sutnar allowed variety within his strictures so as to avoid
standardising his clients’ different messages. Consistency reigned in terms
of an established framework of type and colour choices and layout
preferences, but within these parameters, a variety of options existed for
different kinds of projects – including catalogues, books, magazines and
exhibitions.

Although Sutnar’s English was fettered by a heavy accent and grammatical

deficiencies, he was a prolific writer who articulated his professional
standards in many essays and books that were both philosophical and
hands-on. Visual Design in Action, which furnishes examples from his
own work, argues for ‘future advances in graphic design’ and defines
design in relation to a variety of dynamic methodologies. It is arguably the
most intellectually stimulating Modern design book since Tschichold’s
Neue Typographie.
Uplift the public
Sutnar’s fundamentalist thesis that ‘Good visual design is serious in
purpose. Its aim is not to attain popular success by going back to the
nostalgia of the past, or by sinking to the infantile level of a mythical
public taste. It aspires to uplift the public to an expert design level. To
inspire improvement and progress demands that the designer perform to
the fullest limits of his ability. The designer must think first, work later.’
This final sentence exemplifies Sutnar’s approach to graphic design
practice, and specifically to information design, which he describes as a
‘resolution of the polarities of function versus form, utility versus beauty,
and rational versus irrational.’ For Sutnar, the practice of information

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design, a subset of graphic design, ‘should be understood as the

integration of meaning [content] and visualisation [format] into an entity
that produces a desired action.’ Conveying information was the designer’s
most crucial responsibility.

Sutnar’s writing, devoid of verbiage and mannerisms, is as resolutely

economical as his design. His published texts (and even some of his
personal letters) are organised into idea segments or bites, at the
beginning of which is often a subtitle, framed by parentheses or brackets,
that signals to readers the subject or idea to follow. In the absence of a
subhead, a simple icon such as an arrow or square indicates the start of a
new thought. A letter or number shows where the idea belongs in the
hierarchy of the argument. Italics are common, not just for occasional
emphasis, but are used instead of Roman to convey the intensity of certain
ideas. While these devices were created to encourage reading, they also
allow for efficient skimming.
Sutnar’s experience of the difficulties of English as a second language acts
as a metaphor for why his design is so straightforward. Indeed,
information of the kind presented in the Sweet’s catalogue — which
included everything from plumbing supplies to hydroelectric generators —
was the equivalent of a second or even third language for many of its
readers. So if verbal or written language could not efficiently mediate
information in the age of mass production, Sutnar reasoned that visual
language needed to be more direct to compensate. One of his favourite
comments was: ‘the jet plane pilot cannot read his instrumental panel fast
enough to survive without efficient typography. [So] new means had to
come to meet the quickening tempo of industry. Graphic design was
forced to develop higher standards of performance to speed up the
transmission of information. [And] the watchword of today is ‘faster,
faster’; produce faster, distribute faster, communicate faster.’
Even before the advent of the Information Age there was information –
masses of it, begging to be organised into accessible and retrievable
packages. In the 1930s American industry made an initial attempt to
introduce strict design systems to businesses, but the Great Depression
demanded that the focus be on retooling factories and improving
products, which spawned a new breed of professional: the industrial
designer. In Europe the prototypical industrial designer was already
established and the graphic design arm of the Modern Movement, often
wed to Socialist principles, was already concerned with access to
information as a function of making the world a better place. The mission
to modernise antiquated aspects of European life, including the drive for
efficient communications expressed through typographic purity, began
simultaneously in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Eastern Europe.
Sutnar led the charge in Czechoslovakia in the years before his emigration
to the United States.
An unsung leader
Born in Pilsen in 1897 and a student at the Prague School of Decorative
Arts, Sutnar was already a devout Modernist in the early 1920s. In 1923 he
was made a professor of design at Prague’s State School of Graphic Arts
and from 1932 to 1946 he was its director, a title he kept even in absentia
after his move to the United States. Le Corbusier’s purism influenced his
exhibition design and he developed his own personality as a textile,
product, glassware, porcelain and educational toy designer.
From 1929 to 1930 he was art director on the staff of Prague’s largest
publishing house, Družetevní Práce, where he created playful
photomontage covers that still look remarkably fresh. In magazines like
the Socialist arts journal Žijeme (We Live) and Vytvarné snahy (Fine Arts
Endeavours) and on jackets for books by Upton Sinclair and George
Bernard Shaw, Sutnar’s asymmetrical compositions offered additional
levels of visual experience.
Overshadowed by his contemporaries, the Constructivist and Bauhaus
typemasters El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy respectively, Sutnar is a
relatively unsung leader of Modern objective typography. Yet he was a
household name in Prague (‘To be a Sutnar in Czechoslovakia was to be a
prince,’ recalls his son Radislav Sutnar, who today practises architecture
in Los Angeles). The Sutnars lived in a classically Modern home in Baba, a
residential district of the Czech capital inhabited by many avant-garde
artists. As evidence of Sutnar’s fame, a 1934 exhibition (which is still
intact), ‘Ladislav Sutnar and the New Typography’ earned considerable
praise. The benchmark show was opened by Karel Teige, the leading

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authority on avant-garde design, who said: ‘The graphic design of Ladislav

Sutnar belongs amongst the most thorough, ripened and most cultivated
work brought out by the international movement that gave birth to the
new graphic design of our times.’

Much of the work on show was concerned with communicating

information, but was not information graphics per se. Sutnar’s focus at the
time was on books and magazines, for which he developed strict, though
mutable, typographic grids, in which sans serif type is framed by negative
space in layouts whose compositional precision prefigures post-war Swiss
approaches. Without sacrificing the dynamism of the New Typography,
Sutnar smoothed out its rough edges. He established models that proved
that functional design stripped of ornament was neither cold nor pedantic
when imbued with intelligence. But as Noel Martin points out in relation
to the Czech and later American work, ‘Sutnar always talked about
function, but he created his own ornamentation through geometry and
repetition. Repeating symbols and forms was helpful in expressing an
industrial sensibility.’

Principles of flow
Sutnar was an enthusiastic propagandist for industrialisation. His interior
designs for various World’s Fair pavilions showcased Czech progress. Like
his print layouts, these interiors were based on principles of dynamic flow,
with visitors moving in time through the three-dimensional information
presented just as the eye might read a page of text. Sutnar was honoured
with the commission to design the Czech exhibition at the 1939 New York
World’s Fair, ‘The World of Tomorrow’; however, Hitler’s dismemberment
of Czechoslovakia forced the pavilion to close shortly after the fair opened.
Sutnar, who was in New York to assist in liquidating the exhibition and
bringing its treasures back to Czechoslovakia, decided not to return to
Nazi occupation. Because he did not send back the contents to the proper
authorities, he believed, perhaps rightly, that he was a marked man. So in
1939 he left his wife and two sons in Prague and established residence on
52nd Street, in the heart of New York’s jazz district.

During his first year in New York Sutnar worked briefly with Norman Bel
Geddes, one of the key designers of the World’s Fair, and later at Coty
cosmetics for the former World’s Fair president Grover Whalen. He also
worked for the Czech government-in-exile, which allotted him some funds
for unspecified purposes. He renewed his contacts with other émigré
designers such as the furniture pioneer Hans Knoll, architects Serge
Chermayeff, Marcell Breuer and Walter Gropius, a graphiste Herbert
Matter. Through his friend John Hejduk, who founded the School of
Architecture at Columbia University, he was a frequent guest at dinners
for the Congress of International Modern Architecture, where he met the
director of information-research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, Karl
Lönberg-Holm, who instantly arranged for Sutnar to become his art
director.
Lönberg-Holm was ‘the other half of dad’s brain when it came to
information,’ states Radislav Sutnar. Their collaboration was to
information design what Gilbert and Sullivan were to light opera or
Rogers and Hammerstein to the Broadway musical. Together they
composed and wrote Catalog Design (1944) and Catalog Design Progress
(1950). The former introduced a variety of radical systematic departures
in catalogue design; the latter fine-tuned those models to show how
complex information could be organised and, most importantly, retrieved.
Over 40 years after its publication, Catalog Design Progress is still an
archetype of functional design.
Sweet’s Catalog Service was a facilitator for countless disparate trade and
manufacturing publications which were collected in huge binders and
distributed to businesses throughout the United States. Before Sutnar
began his major redesign in about 1941, the only organising device was the
overall binding, and otherwise chaos reigned. Lönberg-Holm had
convinced his boss, president of F.W. Dodge Chauncey Williams, to order
an entire re-evaluation of the operation, from the logo (which Sutnar
transformed from a nineteenth-century swashed word, Sweets, to a bold
‘s’ dropped out of a black circle) and the structure of the binder (including
the introduction of tabular aids) to the redesign of catalogues (some of
which were done by Sutnar’s in-house art department).
Dynamic spreads
Perhaps the most significant of Sutnar’s innovations was the use of
spreads. ‘Dad was one of the first designers to design double spreads

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rather than single pages, which for him was exclusive to his American
period,’ says Radislav Sutnar about an aspect of his father’s methodology
that is so common today that even in retrospect the fact that it was an
innovation can easily be overlooked. A casual perusal of Sutnar’s designs
from 1941 on for everything from catalogues to brochures reveals a
preponderance of dynamic spreads on which his signature navigational
devices guide the user from one level of information to the next. By
exploiting the spreads, Sutnar was able to inject visual excitement into the
most routine material without impinging upon accessibility. While his
basic structure was decidedly rational, his use of juxtapositions, scale and
colour was rooted in abstraction.
For almost 20 years Sutnar had an arrangement where he worked for
Sweet’s in the mornings and did freelance projects in the afternoons. At
first he had a small studio; later he opened an office near Wall Street
called Sutnar, Flint and Hall. Flint sold advertisements to newspapers and
Thelma Hall, whom Sutnar had met at Sweet’s, ran the studio. After a year
Flint left and the office was moved and renamed Sutnar & Hall. ‘Sutnar
relied on Thelma for everything,’ recalls Philip Pearlstein, the American
realist painter who worked as his assistant from 1949 to 1957. ‘He set the
style and he would explain it to us. He would come in later, usually at
night after everyone went home, to fine-tune things on sheets of tracing
paper that we’d find in the morning.’ Pearlstein suggests that Hall was
both Sutnar’s mediator and whipping girl. ‘He was very temperamental
and would have a veritable nervous breakdown if something was off by 1/4
inch.’ His anger was often directed at the resilient and loyal Miss Hall,
whom he would call at midnight with office business. After she left in 1955
to get married, the business name was changed to Sutnar – Office.
Despite Sutnar’s outbursts, Pearlstein (who says that during his final year
with the firm he and Sutnar did not speak) concedes that his boss was a
brilliant problem-solver. ‘He could intuitively sort out tangled balls of data
with relative ease, and then instantly dray a layout that would perfectly
express his solution.’ One of the most notable problems was the catalogue
for American Standard, a mammoth plumbing-fixture manufacturer
whose catalogues before 1950 were as confusing as they were large. For
Sutnar the job was manna from heaven, Pearlstein recalls that ‘Sutnar
loved to take things apart, find the right organising structure, and
reconstruct it. In this sense he referred to himself as a Constrctivist.’

One of Sutnar’s favourite organisational tropes was precise indexing, both

to avoid misunderstanding and to cut down unnecessary reading time. In
their use of small images, his indexes were akin to a visual Dewey Decimal
system. ‘In the field of encyclopaedic information systems... visual
continuity implies the use of visual interest and simplicity,’ Sutnar wrote
in Visual Design in Action. But though the goal was to save time, he often
introduced design ideas to engender ‘visual interest’ — such as italics as
body text — that were initially difficult to navigate and therefore time-
consuming. Radislav Sutnar explains this away as ‘ the time it takes to get
used to the new is compensated by the long-term savings.’

Utopian idealism
Underlying Sutnar’s save-the-world Modernist mission was the desire to
introduce aesthetics into, say, the life of a plumber. ‘If the catalogue
looked good the user might think about why it looked good,’ explains
Pearlstein, ‘which in addition to being utopian idealism was also a
snobbishness on his part.’ Indeed, Sutnar was a snob when it came to
design. Like other pioneer Modernists he believed that he possessed the
right answers and that everyone else was wrong. Radislav Sutnar recalls
that his father pulled no punches: ‘Some clients loved him, others thought
he was crazy. In fact, people in the United States were often sceptical of
the radical ideas he proposed. He was just so methodical, he had to do
things his own way. But when he hit it right it was 100 per cent; when he
did it wrong it was curiously crude.’
While the term ‘crude’ hardly fits with the meticulous typography that was
Sutnar’s trademark, to judge from the evidence in his archive at the
Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, he did produce a large amount of
aesthetically questionable material. Whether they were the result of too
many compromises or just poor judgement, there is a curious pattern to
his less successful designs, which usually occurred when he used
excessively large type or oversimplified an information graphic. Although
his most flawed work is on a higher level than most everyday design, the
absence of visual nuance, particularly in projects that offered little
opportunity for flow, such as book jackets and record sleeves, resulted in

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mediocrity. Yet even the bad work is an intrusive example of how far the
Modern vocabulary can be pushed.
By 1959 Sutnar had set standards for what he referred to as a ‘new design
synthesis’ in a talk given to the Type Directors Club of New York on the
subject ‘What is new in American Typography?’ ‘[D]esign is evaluated as a
process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension,’ he
claimed. And clients benefited from his unswerving commitment to this
idea. In addition to the Bell System programme, which was only partially
instituted (some of his ideas were cannibalised and patched on to other
designers’ proposals), he developed Modern systems for a variety of
businesses. The most noteworthy include advertising and identity
campaigns for Vera scarves (which despite the mass-market appeal of the
product were masterpieces of Constructivist sophistication); graphic
design and environmental systems for Carr’s shopping plaza in New
Jersey (for whom he developed a lexicon of icons, pictographs and glyphs
which were the quintessential application of rapid identifiers and
symbols); and identity, advertisements and exhibitions for addo-x, a
Swedish business machine company that was in competition with Olivetti.
The addo-x identity was predicated on Sutnar’s belief in the dynamism of
geometric form and is rooted in stark graphics that are bilingually simple,
yet unmistakably recognisable (the bold sans serif, iconographic ‘x’
exhibits a power that could be likened to that of the cross and swastika).
Despite these milestones, Sutnar’s client base was eroding by the early
1960s as old clients retired and younger designers competed for the large
commissions. Sutnar lost his job with Sweet’s because the systems in place
obviated the need for a full-time art director. His friends banded together
to inform the business community and public about his work. The result
was the travelling exhibition ‘Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action’,
meticulously designed by Sutnar himself. The exhibition formed the basis
for his book of the same name, which he financed out of his own pocket
because he could find no publisher prepared to pay the production costs.
He had previously edited Design for Point of Sale (1952) and Package
Design (1953), which showcased exemplary work by others, and though
Visual Design in Action featured only his work, it was no promotional
monograph but a model on which to base contemporary graphic output.
Sales (at the hefty price of $15) were unfortunately not very brisk,
although today the book is a rare treasure.

Prices in the Pantheon

During the 1960s commissions trickled in and then disappeared. ‘Dad
loved to work and was disheartened by the lack of interest in him,’ says
Radislav Sutnar. So he turned his attention to painting what he called ‘joy-
art’ – essentially a collection of geometrically constructed nudes that
resemble, though in fact prefigure, paintings by Tom Wesselman. In a
catalogue for one of his exhibitions Sutnar sums up these rather prosaic
paintings with the statement ‘a “joy-art” painting is in every sense the
genuinely “happy picture”.’ In the late 1960s and early 1970s Sutnar
continued to haunt the New York Art Directors Club, where a younger
generation was relatively oblivious to his achievements. ‘He never spoke
about himself, so I had no idea what he had done,’ recalls Bob Ciano, a
young member who was introduced to Sutnar on a few occasions but
thought of him as just one of many brooding old-timers. In the mid-1970s
he was diagnosed as having cancer and in 1976 he died.

Sutnar left a legacy of work and writing that proves his vitality as a
designer and his passion for design. But most extraordinary is the timeless
quality of his output. Many designers can claim to have one or more pieces
in the pantheon, but thanks to shifts in commerce and style, few can say
that these are as viable now as when they were first conceived. Sutnar’s
most significant work could be used today, and indeed much of it is
reprised by young designers in various hybrid forms. In the field of
information design it is arguable that both Edward Tufte and Richard Saul
Wurman are really just carrying the torch that Sutnar lit decades before,
while many design students, either knowingly or not, have borrowed and
applied his signature graphics to a post-modern style.

Nevertheless, Sutnar would loathe to be appreciated as a nostalgic figure.

‘There is just one lesson from the past that should be learned for the
benefit of the present,’ he wrote in 1959 as if pre-empting this kind of
superficial epitaph. ‘It is that of the painstaking, refined craftsmanship
which appears to be dying out’.

First published in Eye no. 13 vol. 4 1994

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