Abstract
It has been something of a late-life mission of R Roger Remington to bring to the world the importance of Will Burtin and his work in Information Design. A decade and a half ago, he, along with co-author Robert SP Fripp published Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin (2007), thus reawakening many in the design profession to the importance of this consummate corporate designer. Now Remington has teamed with Sheila Pontis, to make a larger work, both in format and in quantity of images; Communicating Knowledge Visually really shows Burtin’s influence in a grand way, and provides a touch of design theory as well.
Will Burtin was one of the many designers who emigrated from Germany during the rise of the National Socialists in the 1930s. In Burtin’s case it was a close thing indeed as Der Führer himself had met with Burtin and essentially ordered him to become Goebbels’ second-in-command (of propaganda). Burtin’s response – ‘Sure, just permit a most necessary two-week vacation to prepare myself for the new challenge.’ The vacation, though, involved taking a fast ocean liner to the United States where sympathetic friends were waiting.
But it is neither Burtin’s biography nor particular life adventures that attract us to this volume. Rather, this is the place to find a concise account of Will Burtin’s thought, his ideas about rational design, design for information rather than for propaganda purposes, humanistic design practices in which a designer tries to convey complex information to others in the most clear form possible. As such, Communicating Knowledge Visually is perhaps the finest account available to the non-specialist of the birth of those principles associated with what we now know as information design. These ideas are rendered less in Burtin’s own words as in 200 lavishly reproduced color images of his designs, and in the way the book is structured according to certain central information design functions.
This latter feature makes a novel contribution to design theory: Remington and Pontis suggest seven ‘dimensions of information design’: purpose, problem, audience, approach, outcome, practice, and education. Taking these seven categories as fundamental classes of concerns for any information design procedure, they then split the corpus of Burtin’s work into these seven highlighted areas and use that work to explicate the dimension at hand. This at once strengthens the argument for the dimensions while magnifying the significance of Burtin’s achievement.
In some ways, Communicating Knowledge Visually acts as a model for a particular kind of contemporary book on design. It does not limit itself to hagiography of the featured artist; instead, it uses the designer’s work to produce an argument for a point of theory. It puts forward that theory through the designer’s work, saying in effect, ‘See how these principles are central to the design enterprise, and see how this designer makes use of these principles to achieve a successful outcome?’ In this kind of design theory rhetoric, the ‘successful outcome’ is actually the starting point – a given premise – because when we see the work we know that it is powerful and achieves its objective. We know it because we feel its success, and we feel its realization through the beauty of the reproductions, through the mastery of the artist’s technique portrayed there. Even separated by time and space from the original intent of the piece, this ‘feeling of success’ becomes the foundation upon which the principles, which the critic now calls to our attention, are built. The principles must be the reason we feel the success, and therefore by extension must represent underpinnings of what ‘good design does’.
Now, we must be wary of this kind of subtle design theory. We can permit it only if we remind ourselves that we must ask further questions of it: Is the feeling of success widespread or only in me or a particular subgroup or culture; Are the enumerated principles the only ones that can be found in successful design or are there others, additional dimensions, contradictory influences, complicating factors? In other words, while we gladly accept the theoretical thinking that is flowing into the design world, let us retain critical appraisals of the work, let us develop additional modes of theoretical dialog.
Ultimately, Communicating Knowledge Visually is a vital contribution both to the legacy of Burtin and to the field of design. In this case, the authors make a very strong argument for Burtin’s centrality to the entire field of information design, at least pre-Edward Tufte. They present a theoretical model, and propose dimensions that must be considered when one works in information design, and they show how Burtin addressed these dimensions in his work. They provide a succinct summary of Burtin’s life, and they show how his commissions changed over the years, moving from print to exhibition design.
A few questions, theoretical and otherwise, linger. For instance, did Burtin meet Otto Neurath or encounter Neurath’s pupil and fellow emigré Rudolf Modley? Neurath and Modley were responsible for the Isotype experiments of the 1930s, and may have been inspirational for the line of thinking Burtin pursued (without mention of Isotype, we are left to assume no influence and no contact). But these questions should not put us off from seeing the contribution that Communicating Knowledge Visually makes for graphic design.