Isotype (picture language)

Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form.

It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition.

"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.

[3] As more requests came to the Vienna museum from abroad, a partner institute called Mundaneum (a name adopted from an abortive collaboration with Paul Otlet) was established in 1931/2 to promote international work.

After the closure of the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in 1934 Neurath, Reidemeister and Arntz fled to the Netherlands, where they set up the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague.

During the 1930s significant commissions were received from the US, including a series of mass-produced charts for the National Tuberculosis Association and Otto Neurath’s book Modern man in the making (1939), a high point of Isotype on which he, Reidemeister and Arntz worked in close collaboration.

Rudolf Modley, who served as an assistant to Otto Neurath in Vienna, introduced ISOTYPE methods to the United States through his position as chief curator at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

Furthermore, by 1934 Modley established Pictorial Statistics Incorporated in New York, a company which promoted the production and distribution of ISOTYPE-like pictographs for education, news, and other forms of communications.

A real test of the international ambitions of Isotype, as Marie Neurath saw it, was the project to design information for civic education, election procedure and economic development in the Western Region of Nigeria in the 1950s.