Demo longread · history of design · interactive version
Vienna 1925 · Moscow 1931 · The Hague 1934
The method that taught people to read statistics by eye. Its rules are not retold here but handed to you: four sliders, one quiz and the chance to break the method's central rule yourself, in one second.
Everything below moves01 Pull the slider
A larger quantity is shown not by a larger sign but by a larger number of identical ones.
An enlarged figure grows in two dimensions at once: double the height and you quadruple the area — and the eye reads area. The chart shows a doubling, the reader sees a fourfold rise.
A doubling is shown — the reader sees a fourfold rise.
Doubled in fact,
quadrupled to the eye
One sign =
1 mln t
Colour here is not decoration: in the charts it denotes a category, which is why blue and ochre appear only inside them.
02 The spine of the story
Vienna after the First World War is the site of a large social experiment. The municipality builds housing, hospitals and schools, and seriously holds that a person ought to understand the economy he lives in.
In 1925 Otto Neurath — economist, philosopher and member of the Vienna Circle — takes over the Museum of Society and Economy and begins to develop what will be called the Vienna method of pictorial statistics.
The task was set sharply: explain how the economy works to people who do not read tables. Not simplify and not lie, but explain.
Otto Neurath — the idea and the rules of the method.
Marie Reidemeister — the transformer: decides what to show.
Gerd Arntz — draws the signs. Some four thousand of them, cut in linocut.
The method turned out to be needed where a new economy was being built and meant to be displayed. In 1931 the All-Union Institute of Pictorial Statistics of Soviet Construction and Economy opens in Moscow — Izostat for short.
Neurath and Arntz are invited as scientific consultants to teach Soviet artists the Vienna method. The institute's best-known publication is the album “Moscow is Being Rebuilt”, 1938. In 1940 Izostat is wound up.
Neurath's role in founding the institute is described differently in different places: in some sources he is the founder, in others a consultant engaged under contract. The archive has been published only in part, and there is no unambiguous answer today.
In February 1934 civil war breaks out in Austria. The Social Democrats are banned and the museum is closed. Neurath is not in Vienna at that moment — and never returns to it.
The team regroups in The Hague. The name “Vienna method” becomes untenable: the city it was named after is no longer its own. Marie invents the name: ISOTYPE — International System of Typographic Picture Education. A method international by design became international by circumstance.
Then flight again: in 1940 Neurath leaves for England, where in 1942 he founds the Isotype Institute. He dies in 1945. Arntz stays in the Netherlands and goes on working with signs there.
One museum, one institute in Moscow, some four thousand signs and a name invented on foreign ground.
03 Graphics
The signs are drawn anew by the rules of the method. Gerd Arntz's work is not reproduced: he died in 1988 and his graphics are in copyright into the 2050s.
The technique dictated the form: linocut has no halftone — only the silhouette, only what survives reduction to a centimetre. Arntz was a strong artist with a recognisable hand — and deliberately scrubbed that hand out of the signs.
For now this is a person with a face and a biography. In a chart he would argue with the one beside him.
04 Reading the sign
0 / 6A sign of the method has to read without a caption. Six of them — guess what they are.
05 The device
The printed dot screen is made as an SVG pattern and poured into the same silhouettes. There is not one image in the file — the whole graphic layer of the page is vector and weighs less than a single photograph.
06 The role
Between the statistician and the artist stood a person who decided what to show out of the data and what one unit was equal to.
The chief transformer was Marie Reidemeister: she also invented the name ISOTYPE and, after Neurath's death, ran the Institute until 1971. In a hundred years both the collection of data and the drawing have been automated. Exactly the middle has not.
| Year | Housing, thousand sq m | Share, % |
|---|---|---|
| 1923 | 412 | 9 |
| 1927 | 1 106 | 24 |
| 1931 | 1 894 | 41 |
The figures in the example are notional — what matters is that the decision is taken neither by the statistician nor by the artist.
07 An ending without gloss
Airport and station pictograms, road signs, evacuation plans, interface icons, the whole of modern infographics — direct descendants. The idea that an image can be a system rather than an illustration became commonplace.
In statistics itself it was displaced: by the second half of the 20th century Isotype's influence on statistical graphics had faded to nothing. The line of exact charts without pictures won — the one on which a sign counts as needless noise.
And the first rule goes on being broken every day: an icon that grows along with its number sits in reports and dashboards and lies in exactly the way it did before 1925. The slider at the top of this page is about today.
Words divide,
images unite
Otto Neurath's motto
08 Credits
The datings of Arntz's arrival in the team differ across sources by two or three years; Neurath's role in the founding of Izostat is disputed and is marked as such in the text; the figures in the chart examples are notional and given to demonstrate a rule, not as historical data. Not one sign by Gerd Arntz is reproduced or redrawn.