Will Burtin

In 1945 Burtin became art director of Fortune magazine, a post he held until 1949. Fortune at that point was spending serious money on illustration and photography, and its art director had genuine authority over the page. Burtin commissioned Jacob Lawrence, organised infographic spreads on atomic energy and computing, and used the book’s scale and budget to advance the use of scientific imagery in American journalism.

Fortune allowed freelance work, and Burtin’s freelance client was Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. He began art directing Scope — Upjohn’s journal for physicians and pharmacists — in 1949, the same year he left Fortune to found his own studio. Scope ran until 1957, and under Burtin’s direction it was reviewed by European design publications as evidence that American corporate publishing could sustain serious graphic work. He and Lester Beall before him were given direct access to the printer — no client approval between design and press — an arrangement almost unknown in corporate communications at the time.

The Upjohn relationship lasted twenty-three years. It produced Scope, a series of packaging and advertising programmes, and the exhibitions that became the most recognised work of Burtin’s career.

Upjohn’s brief for The Cell was straightforward: find a way to communicate new knowledge about organic structure to professional and general audiences alike. Burtin’s answer was not a graphic — it was architecture. He built the cell at a scale where you could walk through it, with each component large enough to examine in detail.

The engineering was formidable. Nothing that complex had been fabricated from clear plastic before; the structural calculations required collaboration with engineers outside the design field entirely. Burtin worked with biologists on the accuracy of the model’s contents, with lighting designers on the pulsing sequences that suggested metabolic activity, with exhibition installers on the logistics of touring a structure that large between cities.

The Cell opened in 1958 and toured for years. The Brain (1960) and The Genes in Action (1963) followed — each applying the same principle, each presenting a different challenge of structural complexity. By the early 1960s Burtin was describing his practice as one of making visible what science knows but cannot easily show. He organised the Vision 65 and Vision 67 conferences — international gatherings of designers, scientists and educators — to explore that intersection more formally. He died in January 1972, the day after his sixty-fourth birthday, from mesothelioma caused by asbestos exposure during the construction of The Cell’s supporting structures.