History and Legacy of Isotype

Sandner and Burke’s fascinating account of Isotype’s global dispersal and applications is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of this influential approach to visual education and information design – Benjamin Benus * Associate Professor of Art and Design History, Loyola University New Orleans *Isotype was one of the great projects of modern graphic design in the 20th century. This book reveals and tells Isotype’s most comprehensive, accurate, and thrilling story. And it makes us wonder what we should take from its legacy in the 21st century. – Hisayasu Ihara * Faculty of Design, Kyushu University *Sandner and Burke bring to light new material on the early history and mid-century development of Isotype and pictographic communication, which enriches our understanding of the origins, aims and legacy of Isotype by locating its roots in the social and educational reform of Red Vienna and exploring how different cultural and political climates influenced its development. Their book helps the reappraisal of Isotype as an open-ended, adaptive system rather than a definitive, or imposed language, and the key role of the “transformer” in the selection and interpretation of statistics for visual communication to public audiences. – Peter Hall * University of the Arts, London *

Christopher Burke is a design historian and Associate Professor in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, UK. He is Research Fellow on the project ‘Isotype: Origin, Development, and Legacy’, based at the University of Vienna, Austria, and he co-curated the exhibition ‘Isotype: International Picture Language’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, UK. He co-edited Otto Neurath’s autobiography, From Hieroglyphics to Isotype (2010), and the collection Isotype: Design and Contexts 1925 1971 (2013).

Günther Sandner is a political scientist and historian. He is FWF Research Fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna, Austria, where he leads the project ‘Isotype: Origin, Development, and Legacy’. He has written numerous essays on the topics of Isotype and logical empiricism and is the author of Otto Neurath, a biography, published in 2014.