Web Design Before the Internet

Short Description
spreads Sutnar harnessed certain avant garde design principles and injected … Funny Garbage and teacher of conceptual web design at the School of Visual …

Website: loop1.aiga.org | Filesize: 74kb

Content
Web Design Before the Internet
Steven Heller
As evidenced by his approach to logical navigation aids in catalog, graphic and
environmental systems design, Steven Heller argues that Sutnar serves as an
important pioneer for the functionality of visual information on the web.
adislav Sutnar designed one of the most common yet revolutionary
graphic devices-the parentheses around American telephone area code
numbers. When first introduced in the early 1960s these three additional
numerals foretold how technological progress would ultimately fill society with
uninvited, unwanted and sometimes unnecessary add-ons. Sutnar, however,
understood practical function and the need to control and organize the plethora
of information that was fast bombarding contemporary life. For the next few
decades, until the swell of even more city, state and country codes, these
simple diacritical marks enabled millions of American phone users to navigate the
arithmetical deluge.
This historical footnote illustrates Sutnar’s life as a pioneer of functional
design. While designers in Europe developed universal sign-symbol languages
to make ideas more accessible or created complex systems that clarified data
hierarchies of vast multinationals, Sutnar designed better ways to organize
quotidian business-something a lesser designer would have found too
mundane. At the height of…