Gerd Arntz was a German, socially-conscious artist & designer. His work was noticed in 1928 by Otto Neurath(1882-1945), a social scientist and founder of the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna, Austria. Neurath had developed a method to communicate complex information on society, economy and politics in simple images. Arntz’s clear-cut style suited Neurath’s goals perfectly, and so he invited the young artists to come to Vienna in 1928, and work on further developing his method, later known as ISOTYPE, International System Of TYpographic Picture Education.
During his career, Arntz designed around 4000 different pictograms, abstracted illustrations (signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy) for ISOTYPE and also a collection of 100 visual statistics ( ‘Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft’), provided an overview of the essential empirical data of the world at that time.
Statistics: The world’s religions & the world’s ethnicities(1930)
The pictograms designed by Arntz were systematically employed, in combination with stylized maps and diagrams. Neurath and Arntz made extensive collections of visual statistics in this manner, and their system became a world-wide emulated example of what we now term: infographics.
Statistics: Population density in major cities(1930)
© via gerd arntz web archive