erd Arntz (1900 – 1988) was a German Modernist artist and activist inspired by social and political issues. In his twenties, Arntz left his bourgeois roots to commit himself fully to the proletariat struggle. His earlier works portrayed social inequities, exploitation and war in black & white woodcuts used on prints that would not only be exhibited and sold to sympathetic art lovers, but published in leftist magazines in Germany and abroad [see images above]. It was in these magazines that Otto Neurath, the spearhead of modern pictograms first discovered Arntz and recruited him to Vienna’s Museum of Society and Economy to further develop ISOTYPE. ISOTYPE, or the International System of Typographic Picture Education is a method of communicating complex information in a pictorial form — much like the symbols we see in modern day signage informing us of things like pedestrian crossings or public restrooms.

During the span of his career, Arntz designed around 4000 pictograms symbolizing key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy for ISOTYPE and worked with Neurath and his team on designing exhibitions and publications for the Vienna museum. More than half a century later, these pictograms still carry a modern and timeless look about them. If you visit the Gerd Arntz Web Archive, you can view a higher-resolution image of each pictogram in its original form, with slight imperfections and all.

After digging around for some informative videos related to this topic, I was delighted to find a talk on “A History of the Stick Figure” that originated from Ignite Portland, which is sort of like a miniature version of TED held at the lovely Bagdad Theater. The speaker, Eric Lewallen, begins his talk with this:

Our stick figure’s past actually begins with statistics, and for that we jump back to around 1920 in post-war Vienna and the work of social scientist Otto Neurath. Now, at this time, much of Europe is still reeling from the aftermath of World War I. There’s a growing interest in constructed universal languages: many people feel that through a common language we could better understand each other and avoid conflict. Neurath believed it was words that led to these misunderstandings in the first place. His interest in hieroglyphics led him to develop a system to help people understand social and economic facts with a minimum of words. To help him develop his system he collaborated with Gerd Arntz, a Vienna artist well known for his black and white woodcuts. Arntz worked in a simple style that could be easily understood by ordinary people, so Neurath molded this style into stick figures that became the building blocks of his pictured statistics.

I’m currently reading the book Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis which also mentions Arntz:

In 1929, the Museum of Society and Economy streamlined its graphic lexicon. Artist Gerd Arntz standardized the typeface that the museum used for banners and text, adopting the Futura font designed by Bauhaus artist Paul Renner. He also developed a ‘tool box’ of standardized pictorial signs that could apply to all graphic media. He designed pictograms with simplicity and accessibility in mind, but also so that they could be combined to form new signs.

A couple examples below of ISOTYPE used in infographics:

I’ll be covering the Neurath book more in depth in the coming weeks. The story behind Arntz, Neurath, and ISOTYPE is an interesting one, and important to know for its historical aspect and impact on design and culture. Meanwhile, visit the links below to learn more about Gerd Arntz. There’s quite a bit of history I didn’t cover in this particular post, because if I did, it’d turn into its own book.

More on Gerd Arntz

• Gerd Arntz Web Archive
• Gerd Arntz on Wikipedia
• Gerd Arntz on artnet
• Isotype Revisited