“Number of motor vehicles in the world.” From the Isotype Revisited website: “Even if one cannot read German, the subject reveals itself through the ‘speaking signs’ of the automobiles, each of which represents 2.5 million vehicles.”
Infographics are everywhere. Over the last few years, they have become the most fashionable mechanism for transforming complex subjects into easily digestible snippets. Some of these artfully reveal hidden facets of even the most familiar topics; others are more like hideous-looking spam. But despite their recent explosion in popularity, infographics are far from new. The format has been experimented with in earnest since the early 1800s, though the development of a more modernized and familiar form picked up steam in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
One of the most important but under-appreciated contributors to the evolution of contemporary infographics was Austrian social scientist and economist, Otto Neurath. During his tenure as director of the Gesellschafts-und-Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy) in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, he and his colleagues, Marie Reidemeister and Gerd Arntz, set out to develop a system to revive dry statistics with vivid pictorial representations—the Isotype.
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Neurath disliked the Mercator Projection and attempted to show its deformative tendencies in this Isotype by projecting it on to a man in a bowler hat.
The project was originally known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, but eventually became known as the Isotype as its ambitions began to expand beyond explaining local social and economic matters to Vienna’s inhabitants. Isotype is a nickname for the enterprise’s longer title, the International System of Typographic Picture Education.
Neurath and his team developed the principles of Isotype by blending linguistic and design concepts to present information in a fashion that was as innovative and intuitive as possible. The system was more generally was intended to be a “technique for visualizing social statistics through pictorial means.” According to Neurath, “to remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.”