Isotype (picture language)

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pages from Neurath's International picture language, 1936

Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition.[1] It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and Economic Museum of Vienna) between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.

Origin and development[edit]








Diffusion and adaptation[edit]



Rudolf Modley, who served as an assistant to Otto Neurath in Vienna, introduced ISOTYPE methods to the United States through his position as chief curator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Furthermore, by 1934 Modley established Pictorial Statistics Incorporated in New York, a company which promoted the production and distribution of ISOTYPE-like pictographs for education, news, and other forms of communications.[4][1] Beginning in 1936, Modley's pictographs were used in a nationwide public health campaign for US Surgeon General Thomas Parran's "War on Syphilis."[1]




See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b c Bresnahan, Keith (2011). ""An Unused Esperanto": Internationalism and Pictographic Design, 1930–70". Design and Culture. 3 (1). doi:10.2752/175470810X12863771378671.
  2. ^ Neurath, Otto (1991). Haller, Rudolf; Kinross, Robin (eds.). Gesammelte Bildpädagogische Schriften (in German). Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. pp. 5, 57, 132. ISBN 978-3209008633.
  3. ^ Neurath, Otto (2010). From hieroglyphics to Isotype : a visual autobiography. London: Hyphen Press. ISBN 978-0-907259-44-2.
  4. ^ Maloney, Russell (February 19, 1938). "Modley's Little Men". The New Yorker.


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