VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION
Ladislav Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar: VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION. New York: Hastings House, 1961. First edition [published in an edition of 3,000 copies]. Small Folio. Natural cloth covers stamped in red and silver. Printed dust jacket. Black endpapers. 188 pp. 36 pp. in color. 342 black and white illustrations. Variety of paper stocks and elaborate graphic design throughout. INSCRIBED by Sutnar to Senator Roman Hruska in pencil on blank front endpaper. Book design and typography by the author. The Holliston Mills Lynton natural cloth covers bright and white. Spine crown lightly bruised. Interior unmarked and very clean. An exceptionally well-preserved copy: a fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Rare thus.
In terms of design, production and contents, this is the most beautiful graphic design monograph I have ever encountered. No disrespect to the Lars Müller reprint, but this edition leaves the contemporary offset reprint in the dust-- Sutnar specified three press passes to achieve the rich density of the black inks This is the real deal, and an opportunity to own an inscribed copy in exceptional original condition in the publishers dust jacket.
8.75 x 12..5 hardcover book with 188 pages; 36 pages in color; 342 black illustrations, printed in both offset and letterpress. Production supervised by Ladislav Sutnar, color portfolios and introductory and closing sections offset printed by Lynn Art Offset, principal texts printed from type by Sterlip Press on Champion Kromekote cast coated enamel paper, written with assistance from Henry T. Langham and John V. Dvorsky, the preface by Mildred Constantine. A truly magnificent production and one of the true high points of American Graphic Design. My highest recommendation.
Visual Design in Action is organized in three sections:
- Principles and Attributes: Visual interest, Visual Simplicity and Visual Continuity. Visual interest is, says Sutnar, " a force of inventive design which will excite and hold attention on the objective. Visual interest draws [viewers] into the process and seeks their participation by arousing their curiosity."
- US Information Design Progress: devoted to the presentation of a series of case studies completed by Sutnar for Addo-X, Knoll + Drake, Vera, Sweet's, Carr's, Theatre Arts and others. Color portfolios demonstrate the realization of Sutnar's principles in advertising, business papers, direct mail, industrial catalogues, exhibits and displays, design for education, magazines, book design, signs, symbol, and information design.
- Early modern Design Concept: traces the emergence of the modern design concept through a showing of Sutnar's formative works done in Europe between 1929 and 1938.
In her preface, Mildred Constantine wrote: " 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."
Steven Heller provides this background history: "Sutnar's client base was eroding by the early 1960s. He lost his job with Sweet's because the systems in place obviated the need for a full-time art director and information research department. At a particularly difficult time, Sutnar's friends banded together to inform the business community about his work. The result was the traveling exhibition Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action, which was curated by Allon Schoener but meticulously designed by Sutnar himself.
"The exhibition was the basis for the book of the same name, which, because he could not find a publisher who would pay the high production costs, Sutnar financed out of his own pocket and sold for the hefty price of $15. Sutnar had previously edited Design for Point of Sale (1952) and Package Design (1953), which showcased exemplary work by others, but Visual Design in Action featured his own work as a model on which to base contemporary design. Sales were not very brisk, although today the book is a rare treasure." Sutnar evidently felt some kinship with fellow Czech-American Senator Roman Hruska.
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.
A true high point of American Graphic Design.
Roman Lee Hruska [1904 – 1999] was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Nebraska. Hruska was known as one of the most vocal conservatives in the United States Senate during the 1960s and 1970s and a staunch supporter of mediocrity in the Judicial branch of government. Hruska was born in David City, Nebraska, proud of his Czech heritage and a lifelong member of Sokol Omaha, American Sokol Organization.
Hruska was elected to the United States House of Representatives from the Omaha-dominated second district of Nebraska. He served only one term, as he ran for a United States Senate seat in 1954, which was vacated by the death of Hugh Butler. Hruska won, and was reelected in 1958, 1964 and 1970 and served in the Senate until his retirement in 1976. Even after Nixon resigned, Hruska defended him and claimed Watergate only became a scandal as part of a partisan effort to attack Nixon.
On October 10, 1978, President Carter signed into law a bill which renamed the Federal Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) located in Clay County, Nebraska after former Senator Roman L. Hruska. The Roman L. Hruska Federal Courthouse in Omaha is also named in his honor.
Hruska is best remembered in American political history for a 1970 speech he made to the Senate urging them to confirm the nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Responding to criticism that Carswell had been a mediocre judge, Hruska claimed that: "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." [Wikipedia]