Author Description

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, the newly emerging mass media began circulating an unprecedented volume of information, leading to a huge surge in visualization techniques. The abundance of news required new forms of representation to enable complex connections to be understood at a glance. This is what prompted the invention of infographics as a visual medium. The publication Image Factories. Infographics 1920-1945 presents groundbreaking infographics by Fritz Kahn, Otto Neurath and numerous graphic designers who worked with them to realize their visual concepts. Starting from two different traditions, the Austrian economist Otto Neurath and the German physician Fritz Kahn developed their distinctive visual languages almost simultaneously, in each case based on a formal stylization of the human body. While Neurath's concept of the "Isotype" generated pictogram-like graphics as counting units for the quantification of social realities, Kahn's "Factories of the Human Body" employed sequences of mechanistically interpreted diagrams in which the human being was depicted as an "Industrial Palace." This book, published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name at the German Museum of Books and Writing in the German National Library in Leipzig, presents historical pictorial material from 1920 to 1945." -- Publisher's description