CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS
ADVANCING STANDARDS IN VISUAL COMMUNICATION
K. Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar
K[nud]. Lönberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar: CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS: ADVANCING STANDARDS IN VISUAL COMMUNICATION. New York: Sweet’s Catalog Service, [F. W. Dodge Corporation] 1950. First edition [less than 1,000 copies printed]. Oblong quarto. Five-color screen-printed glazed paper boards. Die-cut screen-printed dust jacket. Screen-printed plastic coil-binding. Unpaginated [106 pp.] Yellow acetate frontis. Four title pages printed in color on heavier stock. Multiple paper stocks and printing techniques with elaborate graphic design throughout by Ladislav Sutnar. Uncoated jacket with a chip to the front panel, a closed tear from the die cut window to the top edge, spine heel and crown worn, and light soiling and etching especially to the rear panel. Plastic coil-binding in very good condition, with the bottom three teeth neatly split but mostly intact. Boards show inevitable wear to binding edges, with slight pulling to the spine crown. Neat 2.75-inch [xacto?] incision to printed part of the front board. Yellow acetate frontis lightly wrinkled. First page inked with tiny former owners name and spotted from 70 years of contact with the plastic frontis. Overall, a well-preserved copy of this legendary volume—a very good copy in a good or better dust jacket.
9.5 x 12.5 hardcover book with approximately 106 illustrated pages that simply must be seen to be believed. Lönberg-Holm, the research director for Sweet’s, and Sutnar collaborated here in a visual history of the development of catalog design (which is to say, the communication of information) from the early part of the century to the present. Over the course of nearly a half-century, the multiplication of products and the increasing complexity of their functions in building construction have necessitated a revolution in the graphic explication of information and services.
Like his earlier books, CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS is quintessential design, demonstrating visually the principles both writer and designer had developed and employed. A magnificent rich volume, full of design invention and the harmonious employment of a great variety of papers, colors and printing techniques.
“To many people, standards mean only uniformity and restriction, something negative and static. Opposed to this concept of the word is one which may be illustrated by a commonly used expression, like living standards. This may suggest variation, as among the living standards of different parts of the world, or progress, as from the time of the earliest American settlers to the present. In short, the word has potentials, for implying something dynamic, not static- something which is always changing, advancing.
“This dynamic concept of standards has direct applications in the field of industrial product information. With the increasing importance of product information, the standards for its design become more important, requiring continual change and improvement. Technological advance accelerates this process. For example, in such a familiar field of advance as transportation, new standards were required to meet the complex information needs arising with the development of the automobile and airplane.
Thus with today’s industrial development and the concurrent higher standards of industry, corresponding advances must be made in the standards of industrial information itself. The need is not only for more factual information, but for better presentation, with the visual clarity and precision gained through new design techniques. Fundamentally, this means the development of design patterns capable of transmitting a flow of information.”
Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm’s format contributions were “just as dramatic a change from previous product information presentation as was the introduction of the International Style in architecture.” — Joseph V. Bower, Sweet’s National Marketing Manager, 1984
Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976) arrived in the United States on April 14th, 1939 as the exhibition designer in charge of the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Sutnar was the Director of the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading Czech proponents of Functionalist graphic and industrial design.
Unfortunately for Sutnar’s American assignment, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist the previous month. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and divided the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the puppet Slovak State. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the outbreak of World War II stranded Sutnar in New York City where he remained and worked for the rest of his life.
By 1939 many former Bauhaus faculty members—Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, and others—had won teaching positions at various American Universities. These educators were instrumental in bringing European modernism to American architecture and design. America offered the Europeans not only a safe haven, but also great opportunities to make their modernist visions reality. The dynamically developing US building industry and the open mass-production market permitted the exiled Avant-Garde to continue pursuing their ideas in a democratically minded society.
It was in this exile community that Paul Rand introduced Sutnar to Knud Lönberg-Holm, the director of Information Research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, the mediator for trade, construction and hardware catalogs that were collected in huge binders and distributed to businesses and architects throughout the United States.
In 1941 Lönberg-Holm appointed Sutnar as chief designer of the Information Research Division. Together the two men used modern functional principles to solve the contemporary problem of information organization and —most importantly—retrieval. During the next 20 years at Sweet’s Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm defined and pioneered the field now called information design.
Sweet’s Catalog Service (established in 1906) was an information clearing house, evaluating hundreds of catalogs of individual manufacturers with the aim of making the resulting information searachable in an optimal way. Information organization was the central issue, and optimizing it through visual means was an important element in the enterprise, hence the need for a competent art director.
U. S. industrial catalog production in the early 1940s was not in tune with the faster rhythms of the modern tempo. According to an undated internal Sweet’s memorandum “ . . . an industrial catalog is far from an inspiring project, we picture it as cumbersome, colorless, indifferently-printed item of necessity nothing [other] than dreary inventory . . .”
Major flaws included a proliferation of long descriptive texts and mediocre layout, as the manufacturers usually commissioned their catalog production to local printers who simply followed their every whim. The need for informative, relevant and quick-to-read advertising, common in Europe for more than a decade, appeared in the U. S. only with the heightened tempo of production due to the war effort.
During their tenure at Sweet’s from 1944 and 1950 Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm wrote and designed three publications on information design, delivering the most definitive explanation of their mission and in turn they succeeded in revolutionizing the field of information design.
Catalog Design [1944] introduced the basic concepts in catalog design. Designing Information [1947] applied the basic concepts of information design to a broader range, and Catalog Design Progress [1950] further developed ideas in visual communication. All three books demonstrate the very thesis they had worked to develop at Sweet’s — information that is easier to read is easier to comprehend.
According to Steven Heller: "Over forty years after its publication, CATALOG DESIGN PROGRESS remains the archetype for functional design. It is a textbook for how designers can organize and prioritize information in a digital environment . . . "
". . . 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."
"He made Constructivism playful and used geometry to create the dynamics of organization," says Noel Martin, who was a member of Sutnar's small circle of friends in the late 1950s."
"One of his favorite comments was: "Without efficient typography, the jet plane pilot cannot read his instrument panel fast enough to survive. [So] new means had to come to meet the quickening tempo of industry. Graphic design was forced to develop higher standards of performance to speed up the transmission of information. [And] the watchword of today is 'faster, faster'; produce faster, distribute faster, communicate faster." excerpt © 2004 AIGA [sutnar_2023]