Neurath and ISOTYPE
In 1936, Otto Neurath published International Picture Language – The First Rules of ISOTYPE (Neurath, 1936). Seeing visual communication as the way towards international understanding, Neurath developed a pictorial symbolic system, working with the artist Gerd Arntz, who produced over 4000 symbols. Neurath styled his auxiliary picture language ISOTYPE – International System of Typographic Picture Education. His symbols were essentially iconic and well suited to the depiction of matters such as demography and economics, and to the illustration of processes such as the use of a public telephone.
Unlike Wilkins’ system, his symbols closely resembled their referents, and could be used to fulfill one of Chao’s other criteria – ‘relevance of the structure of symbol complexes to the structure of objects’ (1968, p. 220). Thus, an iconic representation of a man could stand for a million men, and strings of these symbols could be used to illustrate comparative populations. Similarly the symbol for a shoe could be combined with that for factory to designate ‘shoe factory’. Hogben (1943) saw ISOTYPE as being ideally suited for illustrating his auxiliary language named ‘Interglossa’. While ISOTYPE’s clear, distinct and geometric style, influenced by Art Deco, has had a major effect on modern signage styles, as an auxiliary language it failed in the way that all artificial languages must fail, i.e. in the criterion of affability. It could not say everything. As Neurath admitted ‘ISOTYPE language is only a helping language for those groups of statements which will be made clearer by pictures.’ (1936, p. 105) Yet, even today, suitable L2 texts can be made more comprehensible through the types of iconic signs used in this system, e.g. processes, graphs, time-lines etc.
Neurath’s system was excellent at representing numerical and statistical facts, as well as providing a clear and simple style for illustrations such as that of the destruction of Pompeii and its subsequent history. However, abstraction and emotion were not its forte, and it remained to another European to develop a system which expresses a much broader range of meanings.
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