Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

retrieved. More than forty years after its publication,Catalog Design
Progressis still an archetype for functional design. Sweet’s Catalog Service
was a facilitator for countless, disparate trade and manufacturing
publications that were collected in huge binders and distributed to
businesses throughout the United States. Before Sutnar began its major
redesign around 1941 , the only organizing device was the overall binding,
otherwise chaos reigned. Lönberg-Holm had convinced his boss, Chauncey
Williams, the president of F. W. Dodge, to order an entire reevaluation
from logo (which Sutnar transformed from a nineteenth-century swashed
word,Sweets,to a bold Sdropped out of a black circle), to the fundamental
structure of the binder (including the introduction of tabular aids), to the
redesign of individual catalogs (some of which were designed by Sutnar’s
in-house art department).
Sutnar was one of the first designers to design double spreads
rather than single pages, an aspect of his methodology that is so common
today that in retrospect the fact that it was an innovation could easily be
overlooked. A casual perusal of Sutnar’s designs for everything from
catalogs to brochures from 1941 on, with the exception of covers, reveals a
preponderance of spreads on which his signature navigational devices force
the users to follow logically contiguous levels of information. Through
these spreads Sutnar was able to harness certain avant-garde principles and
therefore injected visual excitement into even the most routine material
without impinging upon accessibility. While his basic structure was
decidedly rational, his juxtapositions, scale, and color were rooted in
abstraction. Underlying Sutnar’s modern mission was the desire to
introduce aesthetics into, say, a plumber’s life.