Rudolf Modley and the Americanization of Isotype

Abstract

Rudolf Modley was an associate at Otto Neurath’s Social and Economic Museum in interwar Vienna, where the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics was developed. It became Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) from the mid-1930s. Modley went to the United States as early as 1930 and founded Pictorial Statistics, Inc., in New York in 1934 and Pictograph Corporation in 1940. In the decades after 1945 Modley’s activity profile fanned out, but he continued to be active in the field of information design. In his last twelve years, he codesigned the Glyphs Project with cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, which aimed to create a limited number of universally understood symbols. Although Modley was strongly influenced by his early professional experiences with Otto Neurath, he evolved in the United States away from the visual education work practiced in Vienna. His work was therefore not a linear continuation of Isotype, but an attempt to adapt the visual language to American conditions.