PACKAGE DESIGN
THE FORCE OF VISUAL SELLING
Ladislav Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar: PACKAGE DESIGN: THE FORCE OF VISUAL SELLING. New York: Arts, Inc., 1953. First edition. Oblong quarto. Orange paper covered boards with silver quarter cloth titled in orange. Printed dust jacket. Yellow endpapers. 128 pp. 545 black and white illustrations. Book design and custom photography by the author. Interior unmarked and clean. Out-of-print. Tips lightly bumped. Jacket lightly chipped to edges, but still nice and bright. Overall a very good copy in a very good dust jacket.
12 x 9.25 hardcover book with 128 pages and 545 black and white illustrations showing first-rate packaging design in a thorough exhaustive manner, circa 1953. Sutnar said "With the world becoming even smaller, a new sense of world inter-dependence comes sharply into focus. And with it, a new need for visual information capable of worldwide comprehension becomes evident. This will require many new types of visual information, simplified information systems, and improved forms and techniques. It will also make urgent the development of mechanical devices for information processing, integration and transmission.These advances will also influence the design of visual information for domestic consumption."
Contents
- From Package to Dining Table (food)
- Packaged Products for Household Use (cleansers, kitchen utensils, paper products stationery, apparel, gardening supplies, and toys and games, etc.)
- Elegance Sealed in Bottles (perfumes and cologne)
- Beauty Encased in Packages (make up, hair, skin, and teeth)
Designers and artists include Ashley Havinden, Saul Bass, Lester Beall, Fulvio Bianconi, Alexey Brodovitch, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Donald Deskey Associates, Charles Eames, Hansruedi Erdmann, Frank Gianninoto, Lucien Lelong, Herbert Leupin, Cipe Pineles, Paul Rand, Raymond Savignac, Julius Shulman, Ladislav Sutnar, Marcel Vertes, Egmont Arens, Werner Bischof, Milner Gray, Leonard Kessler, Karl Peter Koch, Alexander Lieberman, Lippincott & Marguelis, Adolf Loos, William Metzig, Constantino Nivola, Hiroshi Ohchi, Dmitri Petrov, Harper Richards, Tigrett Enterprises, Frederick Usher, and many others.
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."
Ladislav Sutnar (Czechoslovakia, 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.
“This study of catalog design describes the development of new information patterns through a technique based on analytically determined standards. Its structure follows the procedure of this technique involving: 1) analysis of the design problem, setting up new standards for function, content, and format; 2) the development of standard design elements; 3) the integration of these elements into new design patterns.” — Lönberg-Holm and Sutnar
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]