he designed during the late 1950 s and early 1960 s for America’s
telecommunications monopoly, allowed customers to scan directories more
efficiently. The Bell System was engaged in the technological upgrade of its
huge network, and Sutnar’s brand of functional typography and way-
finding iconography made public access to both emergency and regular
services considerably easier while providing Bell with a distinctive identity.
But in the history of graphic design, Saul Bass received more attention for
his late-fifties/early-sixties redesign of the Bell System logo, which had
little direct consequence for the public, than Sutnar did for making user-
friendly graphic signposts. In recent years information architect Richard
Saul Wurman has also utilized Sutnar’s model in developing the California
Bell telephone directories known as “smart pages.”
Although it was a small part of the overall graphic system, the
parenthesis was one of Sutnar’s signature devices, among many used to
distinguish and highlight various kinds of information. From 1941 to 1960 ,
as the art director of the F. W. Dodge Sweet’s Catalog Service, America’s
leading distributor and producer of trade and manufacturing catalogs,
Sutnar developed an array of typographic and iconographic navigational
tools that allowed users to efficiently traverse seas of data. His icons are
analogous to the friendly computer symbols used today and were inspired,
in part, by El Lissitzky’s iconographic tabulation system in Mayakovsky’s
1923 book of poems,For the Voice. In addition to designing grid and tab
systems, Sutnar made common punctuation, including commas, colons, and
exclamation points, into linguistic traffic signs by enlarging and repeating
them, which was similar to the constructivist functional typography of the
1920 s. These were adopted as key components of Sutnar’s distinctive
American style.
While he professed universality, he nevertheless possessed graphic
personality that was so distinctive from others practicing the international
style that his work did not even require a credit line, although he almost
always took one. Nevertheless this graphic personality was based on
functional requisites not indulgent conceits and so never obscured his
clients’ messages (unlike much of the undisciplined commercial art
produced during the same period).
“The lack of discipline in our present day urban industrial
environment has produced a visual condition, characterized by clutter,
confusion, and chaos,” writes Allon Schoener, curator of the 1961 Ladislav
Sutnar: Visual Design in Actionexhibition, which originated at the
Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. “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
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1