Catalog Design Progress

24 July 2008

Another library find: Ladislav Sutnar’s Catalog Design Progress. The spirit of the book (a sequel to Sutnar’s Catalog Design) is a sort of happy collision of corporate advertising and the emerging “science” of information design. On behalf of his corporate sponsor, Sweet’s Catalogue Service, Sutnar attacks and dismisses the old illustrative, text-heavy style (embodied by the Sears catalog?).

As means for transforming this information complex into an effective catalog pattern, the analysis indicates three design nuclei: 1) visualization of systems, 3) classification of products and competitive features, 3) correlation of dimensions and installation details now scattered throughout the catalog. In this precision of information, irrelevant and obsolete illustrations must be eliminated, repetitious and wordy text reduced.

The idea of the catalog seems crucial to this period in the history of graphic design. As the ultimate index of industrial capitalism, it anticipates the computer database. It requires the designer to organize, systematize, and give inherent hierarchies a visual manifestation.

Catalog Design Progress also draws this amazing analogy to the emerging separation of road uses in the American highway system:

Differentiation of traffic flow finds its clearest expression in today’s multi-lane expressways and parkways. Freed from an obsolete street pattern, fluid forms of increasing variety evolve to meet specific needs. This differentiation of traffic channels in space and time introduces a new continuity of flow. In the design for a civic center (right). the clearly segregated motor and pedestrian lanes beyond and among the buildings are integrated into a unique circulatory system: the old block pattern has been transformed into a new organic unity.

Out with the stodgy old “obsolete street pattern”! In with single use zoning! Here is the modernist instinct to purge the “old ways” and rebuild the world from new forms, preferably inspired by technology and analogies of health and prosperity.