Will Burtin Exhibit

The Will Burtin Archive Project, along with this website, was funded by a 2005/2006 Getty Foundation Grant. This project provides unprecedented access to the vast and rich collection of a key figure in information and exhibit design of the 20th century.

Will Burtin, was one of the foremost information designers of the 20th century. Will Burtin was born in Germany and trained as a typographer and designer at the  Werkschule Cologne, Germany, where he also later taught. Shortly after emigrating to the United States in 1938, he was commissioned to create exhibition units for the Federal Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. From 1943 to 1945, Burtin worked for the U.S. Army Air Corps. In 1945, Burtin became art director for Fortune magazine. Later, in 1949, Burtin established his own design firm in New York with clients including Union Carbide, Eastman Kodak, the Smithsonian Institution, and Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. In 1971, Burtin received a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

The comprehensive finding aid found here is a product of a one-year grant funded project provided by the Getty Foundation. Amy Vilz, the project archivist and author of the 154 page finding aid, provides scholars with a thorough access document for the Will Burtin Archive. We hope all will find it useful in discovering the many facets of Will Burtin’s oeuvre.

Download the Will Burtin Finding Aid (9 MB PDF file)

The Will Burtin Collection documents the work of the pioneer information designer of the 20th century. Born in Germany, Burtin received his training in typesetting and graphic design in Cologne and opened a design studio there in 1927. By 1938, he became one  of Germany’s leading designers with clients throughout Europe, gaining the attention of Adolf Hitler. Facing pressure to accept the position of the Propaganda Ministry’s design director, Burtin fled the Nazis in 1939. After settling in New York City with his wife, Burtin opened a freelance design practice creating advertisements, booklets, magazines, cover designs, and exhibits.  That same year, he was commissioned to design a major exhibit for the United States Federal Works Agency in the U.S. Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. The exhibit featured four free-hanging displays representing education, libraries, recreation, and conservation. He also began teaching at the Pratt Institute, and subsequently became chairman of the Department of Visual Communication.

Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, Burtin designed gunnery manuals for the U.S. Air Force B-29 crews and visual presentations of strategies and other materials for the OSS. These manuals were extremely important due to their ability to communicate complex, critical information with economy of means and clarity.  Burtin was committed to the safety of the gunner, who “was engaged in serious business in which his life might depend on the swift functioning of his knowledge and equipment.  He deserved dignified treatment and the clearest possible statement of facts.”

Following World War II, he returned to freelance  design and teaching.  He became Art Director of Fortune magazine (1945-1949). As Lorraine Wild writes in Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, “during Burtin’s tenure the magazine took on an innovative modern look that matched its audience’s aspiration...Burtin used excellent photographers, and he employed imaginative designers and illustrators to tackle the vast numbers of charts, maps, and other features, dealing with quantified data that were integral to Fortune.”  Burtin  employed important artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Ben Shahn, as well as influential designers Lester Beall, Gyorgy Kepes, and Arthur Lidov to assist in the design process. He also used the work of key photographers including Walker Evans and Andre Kertesz.

In 1949, he opened his design studio in New York City—Will Burtin, Inc. Until his death in January 1972, he served as designer and consultant in advertising for industrial and editorial projects for clients such as Eastman Kodak, IBM, the Smithsonian  Institution, Mead Paper, Union Carbide, Herman  Miller Furniture, and the United States Information Agency.

The principal client with whom he was associated from 1949-1971 was the Upjohn Company. Burtin served as Art Director of  Upjohn’s publication  Scope,  to assist doctors  in understanding medical, scientific and pharmaceutical information for over 15 years. Among the many projects Burtin executed for Upjohn were three famous walk-in exhibits: The Cell, The Brain, and The Chromosome, models of which are included in the Collection at RIT.  The Cell, completed in 1958, was developed by request from Upjohn, as Burtin says, “to recommend a visual method of explaining new knowledge about organic structure to the professional and general public…One of the first conclusions reached was that the entire structure should be built in a size large enough to enable the viewer to walk inside it, so that he would get a most intimate and dramatic close-up view of all the relationships between various parts of the cell and the whole.” The 24-foot three-dimensional model was built with  consultation from leading American scientists including Dr. Porter and Dr. Moses of the Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Hamilton of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, and many other scientists throughout the country.  The Cell  was an immediate success, traveling throughout several U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Kalamazoo, New York City, and  Chicago. The exhibit also traveled to England. With over 2 million people visiting the exhibit, it was reviewed in Newsweek and Life as well as numerous other publications in the design field.

The success of The Cell generated many similar projects for Upjohn, most notably The Brain. As Roger Remington, RIT Professor of Design, writes in Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design, “Burtin defined the design problem as a search for an audiovisual mode of demonstrating the sequence by which the main product of the brain, a thought, evolves. He consulted with structural engineers, physicians, physicists, chemists, and others to ensure accuracy in the presentation while preserving simplicity and clarity of communication. At an early stage of development it became obvious that to be understandable, the form of the exhibit should not be based on the anatomy of the organ but rather on the thinking process itself….The Brain, completed in 1960, was a precursor of what was to become popular as the “light show” or multimedia event. Through projected image, sequence, lights and color – among the components of the exhibit were 45,000 lights and 40 miles of wire – Burtin conveyed the working of the mind in a way never approached before.”

Burtin wrote in 1964, “In retrospect, the most profound experience of working ‘The Brain,’ was the idea that the problem of how we think about thinking had become a design problem as well. In tracing the logic by which awareness of reality and dream is established, I felt often as if I were looking into the  reasoning of creation itself.”  Due to its immense popularity, a second Brain exhibit was created for travel in Europe where it was displayed in Turin. It then became part of a traveling exhibit of Will Burtin’s work entitled Visual Aspects of Science which went to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, then to the Royal College of Art, London and to the Palais de la Découverte, Paris.

Burtin was a design theorist, lecturer and educator, as well as conference planner.  He planned two large influential conferences on design and communication theories. The 1965 conference, Vision65: World Congress on New Challenges to Human Communications, sponsored by the International Center for the Typographic Arts in cooperation with Southern Illinois University, brought architects, designers, film producers, art historians, music theorists, scientists, philosophers and social commentators together to discuss “the broad emergent problems of communications and challenges posed by the technological and social developments in ways which will significantly stimulate the individual and the community.”  The conference was such a success that is was repeated in 1967. Vision 67: Survival and Growth Through Human Communications was held in New York and sponsored by The International Center for the Communication  of Arts and Sciences at New York University and the International Center for the Typographic Arts. Speakers at the 1967 conference included Buckminster Fuller, Umberto Eco, Jean Tinguely, Charles Siepmann, Victor Vasarely, as well as many scientists, psychologists, and scholars from other disciplines.

In 1971, Burtin received the highest honor of the graphic design world, the Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), in recognition of his many contributions to American graphic design as an influential innovator, a gifted visual problem solver, and notable communicator. The AIGA Medal is awarded to individuals in recognition of their exceptional achievements, services or other contributions to the field of design and visual communication.  Shortly after receiving this award, Will Burtin was appointed as Research Fellow in Visual and Environmental Studies at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. Unfortunately, he was unable to fulfill the appointment due to illness. Despite having cancer, he continued to be engaged on a monumental exhibit for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment to be held in Stockholm, Sweden.  The project was realized by his design staff after his death on January 18, 1972. 

“The visual aspects of science have become increasingly part of daily experience. Our environment has been transformed by science but the scope of this basic shift finds many people unprepared. The development of a better understanding of the changed world image has been hindered greatly by an unlimited application of technology and the one-sided commercialization of all values, especially in mass communication. A majority of designs reproduced in this brochure represent a conscious intent to convey the meaning of new knowledge which scientists have gained. I have been fortunate in finding clients who were similarly concerned about this need and who sponsored designs and structures depicted here.”
Visual Aspects of Science. Booklet.

"Assisted by urgent needs for a better understanding of complex problems in medical science and related research, and supported by a progressive manufacturer, it became possible to select themes and to design educational models of some of the more significant structures and processes of life that had been revealed by science in recent years. The primary value of such models - as well as graphic design work preceding and following them - is that they reduce the time necessary for the study and understanding of a science problem.  The secondary value is not less important than the first. It lays in the opportunity to provide a physical and optical orientation that facilitates a better grasp of the inter-relatedness of all parts that make a basic cell - for example - so important for the various chemical functions on which life and health are based."
Design Responsibility in an Age of Science, typed manuscript pp. 12-13.

"Once this overall grasp has been achieved, a student or doctor can remember the character of the whole structure in such a way that deviations from the normal - associated with disease - or the specialization of cells - for muscles, nerves, organs, skin, etc. - are understood.  On this basis, the outcome of further specialized professional study of details which come to scientists in the often confusingly specialized forms of charts, electron micrographs, direct microscopic observations, literature, x-ray diffraction photos or genetic or chemical tables, is greatly enhanced and results in increasing precision, and in real knowledge."
Design Responsibility in an Age of Science, typed manuscript, p.13

"Human imagination is limited by what we can have an image or "model" of. Such models are not necessarily related or limited to representational images in our minds. In communicating a thought we find that we have to project almost continuously images or image-related verbal symbols in order to achieve a situation in which a listener or an audience "sees" - that is - remembers - a semblance of what we project. Thereby the meaning of what we wish to be communicated can be understood."
Design Responsibility in an Age of Science, typed manuscript, p.7

"This condensation of abstract planning into concrete imagery or projected models will have far-reaching consequences for education and for the further exploration of what we can think out, explore and explain."
Design Responsibility in an Age of Science, typed manuscript, p.8

"To convey meaning, to facilitate understanding of reality and thereby help further progress, is a wonderful and challenging task for design.  The writer, scientist, painter, philosopher and the designer of visual communication in commerce, are all partners in the task of inventing the dramatic and electrifying shortcut to a more comprehensive grasp of our time." 
Burtin essay "1920-1940-1960" typed manuscript

Visual Communications 1957 Exhibit

In January 1957, an exhibition of Will Burtin’s designs for Upjohn was shown at the Kalamazoo Art Center.  These audio clips were taken from Burtin’s speech upon the opening of the exhibition.