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url: /design-history/will-burtin/
title: "Will Burtin | The Cell, Fortune Magazine, Scientific Information Design | TGDS"
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# Will Burtin | The Cell, Fortune Magazine, Scientific Information Design | TGDS

Design history · 1940s–1960s Will Burtin The designer who made the invisible visible — building a walk-through human cell, one million times life size, before computers could render it. Will Burtin (1908–1972) was a German-American graphic designer who became one of the twentieth century's foremost practitioners of scientific information design. As art director of Fortune magazine (1945–49) he shaped the look of post-war American business journalism; as design consultant to Upjohn Pharmaceuticals (1949–71) he built large-scale three-dimensional exhibitions — among them The Cell (1958), a walk-through model one million times life size — that brought biology to a broad public decades before digital visualisation existed. Photographer unidentified, c.1960. Will Burtin Papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT. Statutory educational licence. Key facts Born 17 January 1908, Cologne, Germany Died 18 January 1972, New York City, USA Nationality German-American Era American mid-century · scientific information design · exhibition design Known for The Cell walk-through exhibition (1958) · Upjohn Scope magazine (1949–71) · Fortune magazine art director (1945–49) · AIGA gold medal (1971) Archive Will Burtin Papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT · Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (1974) Iconic works Fortune magazine art direction 1946 When Burtin became art director of Fortune in 1945 the magazine was the most ambitious business publication in America — long-form features running alongside commissioned paintings, scientific diagrams and typographic experiments that most newspapers would not attempt for another decade. The October 1946 cover, illustrated by Jacob Lawrence, shows industrial workers rendered in Lawrence's signature flat planes of colour: a deliberate choice to commission a Black artist at the peak of post-war reconstruction. Burtin used Fortune's resources to hire designers and illustrators who were changing American visual culture — among them Alex Steinweiss, Matthew Liebowitz and, on occasion, a young Andy Warhol. Fortune magazine, October 1946. Art director: Will Burtin. Cover illustration by Jacob Lawrence. · Will Burtin (art director) / Jacob Lawrence (illustration). Fortune, October 1946. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory Scope magazine, Upjohn Company 1954 Burtin began art directing Scope — Upjohn's quarterly journal for physicians and pharmacists — while still at Fortune, then continued it as the anchor of his independent practice from 1949. Scope ran from 1941 to 1957 and set a standard for pharmaceutical publishing that European design magazines cited as proof that American commercial clients could sustain serious graphic work. Burtin and Lester Beall, who had preceded him on the publication, were given direct access to the printer — no client approval step between design and press, an arrangement almost unknown in corporate publishing of the period. The Summer 1954 cover shown here uses close-up medical photography on a dark ground, a compositional approach Burtin developed through successive issues to make biological subject matter both precise and arresting. Scope magazine, Summer 1954. Art director: Will Burtin. Upjohn Company, Kalamazoo, Michigan. · Will Burtin (art director), Scope, Summer 1954. Upjohn Company. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory The Cell exhibition, Upjohn 1958 Upjohn asked Burtin to design a public exhibition that would make the structure of the basic animal cell comprehensible to non-specialists. His answer was physical: a walk-through model built at a scale of one million to one — twenty-four feet in diameter and twelve feet high — constructed from clear plastic, aluminium and approximately one mile of electrical wiring, with pulsing lights that made the organelles appear to live. The Cell opened at the annual convention of the American Medical Association in 1958 and then toured Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Kalamazoo before settling permanently at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Newsweek and Life both covered it; the exhibition reached an estimated forty million people. Nothing at that scale had been built from plastic before. The fabrication process was as much an engineering problem as a design one, and Burtin worked directly with structural engineers and biologists throughout. The Cell, Upjohn Company, 1958. Design and concept: Will Burtin. Photography: Ezra Stoller. · Photographer Ezra Stoller, 1958. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory The Brain exhibition, Upjohn 1960 Two years after The Cell, Upjohn commissioned Burtin to apply the same principles to a more complex subject: the human brain. The Brain (1960) followed the walk-through format but added a new challenge — the brain's structure is not radially symmetrical, and its function depends on the relationship between regions. Burtin solved this by combining the physical model with coordinated lighting sequences that lit separate zones as a narrator explained their role. The photograph shows visitors dwarfed by the installation, a scale relationship Burtin used deliberately to shift the viewer's relationship to biological knowledge from abstract to embodied. A third exhibition, The Genes in Action (1963), followed. The Brain, Upjohn Company, 1960. Visitors shown for scale. · Photographer unidentified, 1960. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory Gunner's Information File — Position Firing 1944 Drafted into the US Army in 1943, Burtin was assigned to design training materials for aircrew. The Gunner's Information File was a pocket-sized reference manual for flexible gunnery — how to aim at a moving target from a moving aircraft. The problem was a visualisation problem: the geometry of deflection shooting, previously taught through hours of classroom instruction, needed to be legible at a glance in a gunner's position. Burtin used diagrams, colour-coding and sequenced illustrations to compress the information into a format soldiers could use under pressure. The project is an early example of what he would spend the next twenty years developing: design as an instrument for making technical knowledge accessible to people who need it quickly and reliably, not as a display of aesthetic sensibility. Gunner's Information File (Position Firing), 1944. Designer: Will Burtin. US Army Air Forces. · Will Burtin, Gunner's Information File (Position Firing), 1944. US Army Air Forces. Statutory educational licence. · AU statutory 01 Introduction In January 1958, Will Burtin unveiled an object at the annual convention of the American Medical Association that few people in the room could quite categorise. It was a walk-through model of a basic animal cell — twenty-four feet across, twelve feet high, built from clear plastic and aluminium, with about a mile of electrical wiring running through it to animate the organelles with pulsing light. The scale was one million to one. You entered through the cell membrane. You stood beside the nucleus. Nothing like it had been built before, in any material. The Cell reached an estimated forty million people through its tour and subsequent coverage in Newsweek and Life. Burtin was fifty years old. He had been working toward this kind of problem — how do you make invisible biological processes graspable? — for the better part of a decade. 02 Germany and wartime work Born Wilhelm Bürtin in Cologne in 1908, Burtin studied at the Kölner Werkschulen and interned at a typesetting studio before opening his own design practice in 1927. By 1938 he had clients across Europe — but his wife Hilde was Jewish and he refused commissions from the Nazi state. They fled Germany and arrived in New York in 1939. Work came quickly. The Federal Works Agency, then Pratt Institute (where he would eventually chair the Visual Communication department), then the US Army. Drafted in 1943, Burtin was assigned to design instructional materials for aircrew. The Gunner’s Information File — a pocket reference for flexible gunnery, showing how to lead a moving target from a moving aircraft — was a visualisation problem of considerable difficulty. Burtin solved it with diagrams and colour-coded sequences that made the geometry of deflection shooting legible under operational conditions. 03 Fortune, Upjohn, and Scope 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. 04 The Cell — making biology walkable 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. Learn at TGDS Burtin’s career is a sustained argument that design and scientific knowledge are not separate disciplines. Making complex subject matter legible — through diagram, form, sequence and scale — is a skill taught across our courses: Courses Certificate IV in Design (CUA40725) — covers visual communication, typography, layout systems and information design principles that Burtin applied across every medium he worked in. Intensive Foundation Course — 11 modules covering design thinking, visual organisation and the practical problem-solving at the core of information design. Related movements & people Erik Nitsche Alvin Lustig Alexey Brodovitch Further reading Books R. Roger Remington and Robert S. P. Fripp, Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin. Lund Humphries, 2007. Online Will Burtin Archive, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT. rit.edu/carycollection/will-burtin. Communicating Knowledge Visually — RIT Press monograph on Burtin’s scientific approach to design (2024). rit.edu/press/communicating-knowledge-visually. Will Burtin on Wikipedia. Will Burtin on Wikidata.