lost paws:

George Pendle on Otto Neurath in Cabinet Magazine:

Excerpt: Intent on informing the uneducated Viennese proletariat how the association was improving their living conditions—and perhaps desperate to inject some life into the grim organization—Neurath created giant colored diagrams of the increases in poultry-breeding and vegetable production. Using simple pictures of chickens and carrots, scaled in proportion to the statistics, Neurath discovered a way to popularize statistics, ripping them free from the dusty text of the dour school primer. (That Neurath’s pictograms are intractably associated with today’s school primers shows both our ability to rapidly adopt innovative ideas, and, at the same time, quickly become bored by them). “A silhouette compels us to look at essential details and sharp lines; there are no indefinite backgrounds or superfluities,” Neurath wrote. By using non-realistic symbols as units of representation, visitors to the show could, at a glance, immediately understand complex information regardless of their education. The International System of Typographic Picture Education, or “Isotype,” had been born.

To maintain visual consistency—a crucial factor if the isotype was to be successful—Neurath made print blocks for hundreds of identical symbols. He had soon created a vocabulary of some two thousand isotypes. Units of steel production were depicted by I-beams; strikes were depicted by rows of fists; whenever statistics on workers needed to be shown, the simple silhouette of a man in a flat cap and waistcoat, or a woman in a headscarf and long skirt, was depicted. Neurath had created a Bauhaus of language—functional, formulaic, and, most importantly, for the proletariat.