We are a couple of weeks away from Utrecht Manifest’s 2nd Biennale for Social Design and one of the main events is an exhibit titled Lovely Language: Words Divide, Images Unite honoring two of the titans of visual language, Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. These two pre-Tuftian kings of envisioning information created their own language of textless pictograms as a way of conveying quantitative information with social consequences. They called them Isotypes.
“It was an organized attempt to use graphical design for the purpose of achieving changes in society, primarily through visual education of the masses, and especially by presenting basic socio-economic facts in a readily comprehensible form.”
–from the bio of Neurath contained in the link above
This Isotype is called The Changing Home and begs for a updated version. Click image to enlarge and enjoy
and here is a little gov’t 101
They designed more than 4,000 of them.
This is the image being used to promote the exhibit. Corporate Alphabet, done in 2005 by the Dutch designers Arnoud van den Heuvel and Koert van Mensvoort.
Talk about social consequence! Capitalism has permeated our civilization to the point of corrupting the alphabet. Many of the venues that produce and supply both the textual and visual information we receive have been hijacked.
Typopoly! would be the board game and no one can get out of jail free.
The Isotype Institute is the place for Isotype graphics
From Hieroglyphs to Isotypes is an important source document