Blog of Emilio

Today I begin my research into my visual essay due later this year , I already know what I want to do next year , which is web design , the main reason being that it incorporates the other passion that I have ; graphic design , I love the idea of creating exactly what you want from starch , if you mix that with the interactivity of web design , then you have the potential of creating something special every single time , and this is where the visual essay comes into play , I have create the essay which visually shows my passion for both mediums. I started research into isotope international picture language. There was a exhibition at the V&A museum in London , so i decided to take a look.

Isotype is a method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.

The first rule of Isotype is that greater quantities are not represented by an enlarged pictogram but by a greater number of the same-sized pictogram. In Neurath’s view, variation in size does not allow accurate comparison (what is to be compared – height/length or area?) whereas repeated pictograms, which always represent a fixed value within a certain chart, can be counted if necessary. Isotype pictograms almost never depicted things in perspective in order to preserve this clarity, and there were other guidelines for graphic configuration and use of colour. The best exposition of Isotype technique remains Otto Neurath’s book International picture language (1936).

Visual education” was always the prime motive behind Isotype, which was worked out in exhibitions and books designed to inform ordinary citizens (including schoolchildren) about their place in the world. It was never intended to replace verbal language; it was a “helping language” always accompanied by verbal elements. Otto Neurath realized that it could never be a fully developed language, so instead he called it a “language-like technique”.

What i can take from this is how pictures , images , symbols can be used to represent information instead of words, this vitally important in the whole of web and graphic design , and more and more innovative web sites are using less and less words just using  images , sounds , emotion to interact with the costumer.