Otto Neurath (1882-1945) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. In the 1920s Neurath developed the "Social and Economic Museum" to convey complicated and economic fact to a largely uneducated Viennese public. This led him to work on graphic design and visual education. With the ilustrator Gerd Arntz (1900-1945) he created Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), a symbolic way of representing quantitaive information via icons. Eventually Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, wich symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politic and economy. The two basic rules of Isotype are that a greater number should be represented by a greater number of signs - not by a single large sign - and, second, that the presentation is free of perspective, where distance would require signs to be smaller and thus confuse their value.
Isotype was also a visual system for displaying quantitative information of the sort later advocated by Edward Tufte.

www.gerdarntz.org
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