Will Burtin: scientific principles
Above: the walk-in Cell exhibition, a million times larger than life, designed by Will Burtin for UpJohn. From Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin, reviewed by Eye art director Simon Esterson in Eye no. 68. Below: more Burtin art direction, as seen in an early Eye article about Fortune (which Burtin art directed from 1945-49) by magazine design expert William Owen.
Above: spread from Eye no. 2 showing three Fortune covers art-directed by Will Burtin. Left: April 1946, illustrated by Lester Beall; right below, July 1946 illustrated by Ladislav Sutnar; right above; December 1946, illustrated by Alvin Lustig. The centre right cover, October 1943, was art-directed by Peter Piening and illustrated by Herbert Matter. Below: covers from Scope, Upjohn’s pioneering house magazine, which use Burtin’s information graphics to explain complex scientific ideas.
See more Burtin images at thingstolookat.
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August 5th, 2008 at 5:03 am | by Robert Fripp
My thanks to Simon Esterson for his insightful review of “Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin” (which I wrote with Roger Remington). Esterson’s conclusion may be prophetic. He writes: “There is a history of contemporary information design, from print to online, waiting to be written: when it is, Will Burtin will figure as one of its founding fathers.”
Burtin wrote a great deal on that topic. I can’t say that Roger and I are contemplating writing the “history of contemporary information design, from print to online” that Esterson might like to see. However, the Will Burtin archive houses enough material for a future author to justify calling Burtin a founding father of information design.
Robert Fripp, co-author of
“Design and Science: The life and work of Will Burtin”
April 28th, 2009 at 7:31 am | by Eye blog » Scott Dadich at the EDO. Star Trek’s sci-fi geekery sugars the science pill of the San Fran mag
[...] spirit of Lester Beall or Will Burtin’s work for Fortune magazine lives again, but reinterpreted for a different age where a certain amount of journalistic [...]
May 1st, 2009 at 9:26 am | by Eye blog » The canon, aimed at your back. An exclusive, Web-only Critique by Rick Poynor for the Eye site and blog
[...] figures of manifest stature and significance can later sink into obscurity. This has happened to the innovative German émigré Will Burtin, who built a career in the US as an information designer, specialising in the visualisation of [...]