Isotype: an exploration in design

It started on an evening flight from New York to Atlanta: the cabin lights were down, I had a stack of Isotype charts on my laptop, and I couldn’t stop looking at them. That turned into years of research on pictorial statistics as Otto and Marie Neurath, Gerd Arntz and Rudolf Modley practised it, from Vienna in the 1920s to wartime Britain and American newspapers.

The Lessons of Isotype series takes single charts and whole books apart to see how they work, and the method still shapes how we design. Steven Heller covered the research, and the book it was heading towards, in “Birthing Dataviz” for Design Observer.