Talk:Ladislav Sutnar

Research Draft
Ladislav Sutnar (1897-1976)
 * General Overview: Born November 9, 1897, in Pilsen, Czech Republic (or Plzen in then western Bohemia); died after a brief illness, November 13, 1976, in New York, N.Y. Graphic designer and author. Sutnar came to the United States in 1939 to design the Czech pavilion for the World's Fair, and he remained in America because of the Nazi domination of his homeland. He received design commissions from a variety of employers, including McGraw-Hill, International Business Machines (IBM), and the United Nations. He also worked for Sweet's Catalog Service for almost twenty years. Sutnar held many one-man exhibitions, and his work is on permanent display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His books include Controlled Visual Flow: Shape, Line and Color, Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling, and Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes.--Nboffa (talk) 14:16, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
 * He is primarily known for putting the parentheses around American telephone area-code numbers when they were first introduced. --Nboffa (talk) 05:31, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

…. --Nboffa (talk) 05:46, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Design for the public good:
 * He was not credited for the implementation of parentheses around the American area code despite his design programs for Bell System (late 1950s-early 1960s). This allowed much easier access to normal and emergency services. The reason for lack of credit lies in the fact that Bell System consider "graphic designers as transparent as the function graphics they designed" . Sutnar used parentheses in his own work to highlight and distinguish information.
 * As the art director (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.
 * Grid and tab systems--Sutnar made common punctuation into traffic signs by enlarging and repeating them.
 * Similar to Jan Tschichold's work,
 * His style: limited type and color; strict layout preferences.
 * Visual Design in Action argues for future advances in graphic design and defines design in relation to a variety of dynamic methodologies. It is arguably the most intellectually stimulating Modern design book since Tschichold's Die Neue Typographic".
 * Great quote by Sutnar: “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”.


 * Toy Design
 * Designed toys starting in 1924. These consisted of simple geometric toys of animals and complex marionettes. He attempted to introduce modern aesthetics into children's toys by developing a building kit that consisted of sawtooth roofs, cones, and pieces in the colors of red, blue, and white (this remained a prototype). He also wrote a children's book on the future of traffic in Transport: Next Half Century.
 * Sutnar created art-oriented toys, i.e. "Apisonadora" (construction vehicle). This page from Design Boom also has some photos of the original wood toys as well as more genereal info and listings to build off of regarding Sutnar and his variety of works. --Nboffa (talk) 14:37, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Book designs: Followed the principles of De Stijl with colors reduced to the primary colors, elimination of curves, the balance of asymmetrical alignment of text but with the exception of an encompassed diagonal composition. His strong use of diagonal elements, typography and imagery more strongly conveys his design style to be classified as Constructivism. Space is divide into white and black areas and consist of elements with symbolism.. Example: Sutnar's cover of Nejmensi dum (Minimum Housing), 1931).
 * Pre-WWII contributions:


 * Information graphics: Sutnar was one of the first designers to actively practice the field of information design. His work was rooted in rationality and the process of displaying massive amounts of information in a clear and organized manner for easy consumption by the general viewer. He placed a heavy emphasis on typography and primarily used a limited color palette. While he often used punctuation symbols to help organize information one of his signature creations was the idea to place parentheses around the area codes in telephone books. For nearly 20 years he served as the art director for Sweet's catalog services where he created information graphics and catalog layouts for a wide range of manufactured items. Before working for Sweet's he taught at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague. He was heavily influenced by the ideas of Modernism and his work was so well structured that he had no problems communicating information clearly to an American audience, even though English was not his primary language. --Nboffa (talk) 15:00, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Strip Street: The 1960s were tough for Ladislav Sutnar (1897-1976). Apart from a 1964 commission to design AT&T's directory (it was Sutnar who put our area codes in parentheses), design jobs for this Czech émigré had slowed to a trickle. For solace, he published Strip Street (1963), an album of 12 erotic silk-screen prints, and organized two New York gallery exhibitions of his nudes, In Pursuit of Venus (1966) and Venus: Joy-Art (1969). While Sutnar's hierarchical design approach earned him a reputation as a father of modern information design, his more visceral "joy-art" was planned just as schematically. "In these disturbed times of cool and alienated society," he wrote, "if the paintings can inject the feeling, the mission is accomplished." Sutnar's paintings are reproduced in a 392-page monograph, Design in Action (Museum of Decorative Arts/Argo Publishers; available at sutnar.com), which accompanied last year's retrospective at the Prague Riding School. --Nboffa (talk) 15:17, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, this "avant-garde design who brought Constructivism to American corporations" remains unknown for these racy images to which he wrote an essay to accompany . (Tomas Vlcek, who has written about this relatively forgotten aspect of Sutnar's work, suggests the influence of Pop, yet also notes that the artist hated Pop and Op Art.) The term "posters without words" refers to Sutnar's distinct poster-like design that characterizes the individual prints of this series. Nboffa (talk) 05:29, 3 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Other
 * Teaching: "Ladislav Sutnar is an authority on exhibition design, typography, advertising, posters, magazine and book design. In the field of education his most recent contribution has been the teaching of advanced advertising design at the Pratt Institute...represent the modern--if not industrial expressionist school--of advertising art" . — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nboffa (talk • contribs) 03:42, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Artel Cooperative member: These Czech craft and furniture workshops, based in Prague, owed their inspiration to the Wiener Werkstatte and generated designs in ceramics, textiles, carpets, furniture, and metal with the intention of re-establishing a more aesthetic everyday environment. Other designers for Artel included Vlastislav Hofman and Rudolf Stockar. The organization came to an end in 1924. Nboffa (talk) 04:47, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Published Books:
 * Catalog Design Progress by Sutnar and Longberg-Holm solved sales and advertising problems by focusing on product information and "living standards" of all forms of information design. Composed of four parts, it begins with patterns influenced by industrialization, such as street patterns and transportation. Part two features visual features of design, typography, pictures, charts, and covers. Color, shape, and size are used as tools to direct eye movement. Part three directs structural or layout features, i.e., page organization, catalog organization, and file organization. The last part is devoted to form, flow and form--three fundamental design principles. The purpose of the industrial catalog is deemed by these authors "to facilitate product selection by providing users with an information tool adapter to his pattern of inquiry" . Nboffa (talk) 04:31, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Along with Jaromir Funke, he published Fotografie vidi povrch (Photography sees the surface, 1935) . Nboffa (talk) 05:08, 3 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Poster design
 * Visit the Modern Textile Exhibition (1930, Now in U.S.A) "is a fine example of clear communication in its most vivid form...represent[s] the power of words, the authority and ability of written characters to focus attention without the help of a pictorial image" . Nboffa (talk) 05:18, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Summary 11/3
(Apologies for the slight disorder and content; much easier for me to lay it all out in this fashion.) The total number of sources is spread out between the original 'sources' header and the generated 'references' as I had already begun to write a draft of the research. I found out that Radislav Sutnar, Petr and Iva Knobloch were used as references to help write one of the more recent articles on Ladislav Sutnar, so perhaps, I can locate any of them and reach out for more information. I plan to expand a lot more on the different categories I have listed above. I am going to dig a bit more into The Commons to see what is available image-wise later on. I am able to retrieve a lot of articles about his works, but I think I may be lacking some about his personal life/journey to America--definitely can be expounded on. I think I will also need to differentiate somehow between the works he did in America and Czech. I have not yet been able to find any honors he received, so that would be interesting to include although it has been noted by many sources I have encountered thus far that he remains uncredited for a lot of his work. I think it would be beneficial to include a section at the end including works and examples inspired by Sutnar. As for now, I am finding more and more about Sutnar than I originally had thought outside the world of information graphics. --Nboffa (talk) 06:01, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment
This article is the subject of an educational assignment at College of Staten Island/City University of New York supported by GLAM/MoMA and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program&#32;during the 2011 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

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