Isotype

Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Isotypes are known as a pictionary language it helps those people who cannot understand or read, there are as many as 4000 isotype pictures. Many artists contributed in this technique but the creation of these graphic/illustration pictures was created by Otto Neurath (1888-1945) his wife Marie Neurath and Gred Arntz (1900-1988).

Otto was born in Vienna he was a philosopher, economist and social scientist. As a child Otto was fascinated by Egyptian hieroglyphics-how the pictures would form a story, this influence is later shown in his work. Whereas Arntz was influenced by Expressionist and Constructivist movements,expressing his socialist values through wood block painting. 

Otto was the head of housing museum, The Social and Economic Museum of Vienna. In 1920 the post war Vienna began, many people in that time could not read and was panicking about the war. Therefore Otto and his wife were employed by the government to communicate complex information such economy and politics to the society. So Otto came up with an idea called ‘Vienna method of visual statistics’ which today is known as Isotypes -translating words into simple images. In order to make this idea successful Otto hired artists, one of them was Gred Arntz from Germany. Arntz was a big helping hand in Otto work he was given the role as a designer task.

In 1931 Otto, his wife and the group of artist was forced to fly to Russia to help the Soviet authorities with their imagery statistics. Otto and his group of artist had to transform something dull into appealing visuals.

In 1940 Otto and wife came to live in Britain. During the post war of Britain they again started to create isotype pictures in order to help the people, not only that they also started to create isotype booklets. 

By the 1950s, their work had spread to Africa, where it was considered that the isotype process could work in countries where less people could read.

There are many rules that Otto created in order to form an isotype picture like for example;

-not using letters and numbers

-near enough any nationality could understand

-bold colours or line colour technique only

-the image scale should not indicate amount of size, for example;

This correct isotype graph shows a field divided into three sections, each representing the proportion of land used for wheat and other arable crops, for cattle, and as wasteland (left to right). A line of farm-workers is shown below, tilling the land with a horse-drawn plough.