Stylogeny combining Isotype Pictorial Statistics × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

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Isotype Pictorial Statistics × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Isotype counts with pictograms and the production book narrates with schematic workers and tools; combine them for explainers that show how something is made, step by step.

From the research on Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Mix them and make something Isotype Pictorial Statistics Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

TOMORROWIsotype Pictorial × Leningrad Avant-Garde
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Isotype Pictorial Statistics, their arrangement from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, the finish from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Isotype Pictorial Statistics Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Type from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book
Colour from Isotype Pictorial Statistics
Form from Isotype Pictorial Statistics
Composition from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book
Surface from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

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The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Tomorrow

Inter Tight, standing in for Grotesque capitals, one word diagonal (cover of Kak rubanok sdelal rubanok, 1927)

Text · Isotype Pictorial Statistics

A method of visual education developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath (Reidemeister) and Gerd Arntz in Red Vienna from 1925, which turns statistics into rows of identical pictograms where a greater quantity is shown by more signs, never by bigger ones. Continued in The Hague and Oxford until 1971, its standardised symbols, flat colours and sans-serif captions laid the foundations of modern information graphics and pictogram systems.

Jost; Isotype Pictorial Statistics used Futura and Gerd Arntz's linocut pictogram set (c. 4,000 signs), used like a fount of picture-type

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Isotype Pictorial Statistics, with a counter-accent from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Isotype Pictorial Statistics Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

  • #f2ecdf ground · 36%
  • #1a1a1a ink · 14%
  • #c8372d accent · 18%
  • #2c5aa0 accent · 14%
  • #e0b23f accent · 10%
  • #8a5a3b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2ecdf;
  --ink: #1a1a1a;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #2c5aa0;
  --accent-3: #e0b23f;
  --accent-4: #8a5a3b;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: These books' makers were later persecuted: Vera Ermolaeva was arrested in 1934 and shot in a Karaganda camp in 1937, the Leningrad editorial office of the children's publishing house was broken up in 1937 with arrests, the poet Nikolai Oleinikov was shot that year, and Daniil Kharms died in a prison psychiatric ward in besieged Leningrad in 1942. Do not treat the idiom as cheerful Soviet nostalgia or propaganda pastiche. Its schematic types include racialised figures, such as Tsirk's Black violinist drawn as a solid black silhouette: simplify every figure with the same economy, and never use skin colour, hair or dress as an ethnic marker or joke. Lebedev (d. 1967) and Marshak (d. 1964) are still in copyright in Russia and the EU (life plus 70 years): draw your own figures and verses instead of reproducing their pages.

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The two styles

A cream-coloured infographic headed “TO SCHOOL” shows rows of red pedestrians, blue cyclists, green buses, brown cars and black scooter riders, labelled 20, 12, 8, 6 and 4. Buildings, four round green trees and a red schoolhouse form a strip along the bottom. 1925–1971 · Central Europe, Western Europe Isotype Pictorial Statistics A method of visual education developed by Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath (Reidemeister) and Gerd Arntz in Red Vienna from 1925, which turns statistics into rows of identical pictograms where a greater quantity is shown by more signs, never by bigger ones. Continued in The Hague and Oxford until 1971, its standardised symbols, flat colours and sans-serif captions laid the foundations of modern information graphics and pictogram systems. A stylised yellow dog with black patches, a blue collar and a red tongue bounds toward the right on a cream background. Huge red Cyrillic lettering reading “БЕГИ!” rises diagonally above it, with speckled print texture throughout. 1922–1936 · Eastern Europe Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book Thin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor. People, animals and machines are cut into flat, mostly unoutlined planes of a few bright lithographic inks and float on bare paper. Hand-drawn grotesque capitals frame the picture, and 'production books' show how things are made. Pravda's 1936 attack on 'artist-daubers' (khudozhniki-pachkuny) forced it towards naturalism, and in 1937 the Leningrad children's publishing house was broken up with arrests.

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