Ladislav Sutnar

Ladislav Sutnar was born in Plzeň, Bohemia, on 9 November 1897. He trained at the School of Applied Arts in Prague and subsequently at Charles University, where he studied architecture alongside design. By the early 1920s he was teaching at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague, and by 1932 he was its director.

The Prague years produced a substantial body of work rooted in Central European modernism: photomontage book covers for the Czechoslovak Cooperative Works (Družstevní práce) publishing house, exhibition design, and product design for Czech manufacturers. His approach drew on De Stijl geometry and Constructivist logic — primary colours, hard edges, asymmetric composition — but applied these to commercial and public-information contexts rather than fine-art manifestos.

In April 1939, Sutnar arrived in New York to oversee the Czechoslovak pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia had already begun; when the pavilion was shut down in May 1939 following German pressure on the Fair’s organisers, Sutnar had a straightforward choice. He stayed. He left his wife and two sons in Prague — they were not reunited for six years — and established himself in New York.

His first American years were uncertain. He worked briefly with industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes and did packaging and identity commissions where he could find them. In 1941, F.W. Dodge Corporation hired him as art director of its Sweet’s Catalog Service, the largest distributor of trade and manufacturing catalogue information in the United States. He remained there for nineteen years.

At Sweet’s, Sutnar worked alongside Knud Lönberg-Holm, the service’s research director, to systematically redesign how industrial product information reached the architects, engineers, and contractors who used it. The two men co-authored Catalog Design (1944), Designing Information (1947), and Catalog Design Progress (1950) — three books that articulated the principles behind the practice they were building in parallel.

After leaving Sweet’s in 1960, Sutnar ran his own studio and continued taking on identity, poster, and publication work. In 1961 he organised a travelling exhibition of his work, “Visual Design in Action,” and self-financed the accompanying book of the same name. He received the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame induction in 1979 (posthumously) and the AIGA gold medal in 1995. He died in New York City on 13 November 1976.

Sutnar’s position was that design is a functional act, not an expressive one — or rather, that expression only becomes design when it solves a problem the viewer actually has.

His central problem was navigation through large bodies of information. Before Sutnar’s redesign, Sweet’s Catalog Service binders contained hundreds of pages of product specifications with no consistent structure: different companies used different heading conventions, different page formats, different symbol systems. The only organising device was the binder itself. “Chaos reigned,” as one contemporary critic described it.

Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm diagnosed the problem as a failure of visual flow. A user arriving at a catalogue needed to understand immediately what was on the page, where to find related information, and how to move between sections. That required three things that were then absent: a consistent typographic hierarchy, a navigational symbol system, and a cross-reference structure that could be followed without reading everything sequentially.

“The designer must think first, work later.” — Ladislav Sutnar

Their solution used grids, tabs, icons, and punctuation marks as navigational devices. The parentheses around American telephone area codes — the one piece of Sutnar’s work that became invisible infrastructure — emerged from the same logic: the mark is not decoration but a functional signal, telling the reader that the enclosed number operates at a different level of the information hierarchy than the digits that follow it.

Sutnar borrowed the term “information design” from Lönberg-Holm’s architectural background. Their books defined it as the process of integrating content with visual format to produce a desired action in the viewer. The definition is specific: not beautification, not simplification as an end in itself, but the specific action of directing attention, enabling navigation, and reducing the cognitive load of finding what you need.