Sutnar, Ladislav: HONEYWELL CUSTOMIZED CONTROLS. Sweet’s Catalog Service, c. 1952. With Knud Lönberg-Holm.

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HONEYWELL CUSTOMIZED CONTROLS

Knud Lönberg-Holm, Ladislav Sutnar [Designer]

Knud Lönberg-Holm, Ladislav Sutnar [Designer]: HONEYWELL CUSTOMIZED CONTROLS [Catalog 28i/Mi 1]. New York and Minneapolis: Sweet's Catalog Service for Honeywell, n. d. [circa 1952]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Stapled self wrappers. 40 pp. Elaborate 2-color graphic design throughout. Wrappers pulling away from staples. Light foxing to last few leaves. Tiny dampstain to lower fore edge of last nine leaves. A good copy. Not in Janakova.

8.36 x 11 saddle-stitched 40-page Sweet's Catalog Service catalog printed in two colors throughout featuring Sutnar's theories of shape, line, color and flow applied to an Industrial Information catalog. Sutnar worked as the Art Director at Sweet's from 1941 to 1960, where he radically reshaped the Company's approach to visual communication. This Honeywell Catalog is an exceptional early example of Sutnar's Information architecture.

"The function of an industrial catalog is to facilitate product selection by providing its users with an information tool adapted to his pattern of inquiry. The function of catalog design is to simplify an increasingly complex flow of product information through emphasis of visual means and through organization of a logical information sequence." -- Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm: CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS: ADVANCING STANDARDS IN VISUAL COMMUNICATION. New York: Sweet’s Catalog Service, 1950.

Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm utilized their functional organization and prioritization information design theories codified in CATALOG DESIGN [1944], DESIGNING INFORMATION [1947] and CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS [1950] when they produced this magnificent catalog for Minneapolis's Honeywell Corporation.

According to Steven Heller: ". . . Ladislav Sutnar was a progenitor of the current practice of information graphics, the lighter of a torch that is carried today by Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman, among others. For a wide range of American businesses, Sutnar developed graphic systems that clarified vast amounts of complex information, transforming business data into digestible units. He was the man responsible for putting the parentheses around American telephone area-code numbers when they were first introduced."

"As impersonal as the area-code design might appear, the parentheses were actually among Sutnar's signature devices, one of many he used to distinguish and highlight information. As the art director, from 1941 to 1960, of F. W. Dodge's Sweet's Catalog Service, America's leading distributor and producer of trade and manufacturing catalogues, Sutnar developed various typographic and iconographic navigational devices that allowed users to efficiently traverse seas of data. His icons are analogous to the friendly computer symbols used today."

Mildred Constantine wrote about Sutnar in 1961: " There is a force and meaningful consistency in Sutnar's entire body of work, which permits him to express himself with a rich diversity in exhibition design and the broad variations of graphic design. Sutnar has the assured stature of th integrated designer."

Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976) was one of the most ardent advocates of pure visual education in his designs and writings. Sutnar left Czechoslovakia after the Nazi occupation to design the Czechoslovak Pavilion in the World's Fair in New York in 1939 . He never returned to his homeland. After one desperate year of looking for a job in New York, in 1941 Ladislav Sutnar met Knud Lönberg-Holm,the Danish-born architect who was director of Research at Sweet's Catalog Service. Holm hired Sutnar as art director. Sweet's Catalog Service was the producer of trade, construction,and hardware catalogs that were distributed to businesses and architects throughout the United States. Sutnar and Holm radically transformed the organization and presentation of technical and commercial information. Sutnar said "If a graphic design is to elicit greater intensity of perception and comprehension of contents,the designer should be aware of the following principles: 1) optical interest,which arouses attention and forces the eye to action; 2) visual simplicity of image and structure allowing quick reading and comprehension of the contents; and 3) visual continuity, which allows the clear understanding of the sequence of elements."

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