The latest issue of Wired has a fantastic feature, Intelligence Redesigned, updating 50s science textbook illustrations using current scientific knowledge and design techniques. Taking this as an example of Wired's dedication to hybrid formats of journalism, storytelling and design is the way this story has been parsed.
I came across this story in the print version and instantly knew I had to reflect on the article here but waited on buying the issue until the price dropped from international overnight rates to the more sensible local price. Meanwhile, I looked online to see if the article had been posted. The online version has been translated from print to web in quite a nice way, allowing you to zoom in on the imagery. All while keeping the original look and feel of the article. Meanwhile, there's an interview with the author of these books Roy Gallant; although sadly not the illustrators - the real heroes of the story. To make matters even more interesting the Storyboard podcast has a discussion with the author of this piece, looking at the idea behind the article and some of the problems they came up against in translating the illustrations. For some reason they also provided print ready pdfs of the spreads causing me to spend way too much time playing around with them for this post. I won't discuss the changes they made in too much detail as the writers of the article, Carl DeTorres and Timothy Lesle have said it better than I could.


I've been a sucker for vintage science illustrations for a year or so, quietly collecting my own collection and documenting them to put up here. I suppose this will be the impetus I need to put some of them up here. In the process of collecting I've been thinking how they could be updated for today and these succeed on so many levels. As a technical exercise, they're fantastic, and achieve updating not only the complexity of what we now know, but in how we know and perceive it. Something painterly explanations could never hope to match, despite their warmth.
What I find wonderful and charming about all of the original illustrations is their attempts to map and visualise the new and the unknown. Even the redesigned images illustrate not just the original information but explain new understandings of these systems, especially so with the earthquake visualisation. On a side note - is it just me or does anyone else find it unsettling that we live on a planet that is filled with boiling hot magma surrounded by a thin shell? Anyway. In the podcast they discuss the difficulties they had in exploring and visualising the idea that the earth is a three dimensional sphere existing in time, something omitted from the original. This is also shown in the representation of the atmosphere with the simple addition of the third dimension. At first I felt it an unnecessary addition. But considering no one had seen a photograph of the whole earth at that point, it is a very important addition.
Meanwhile, today's scientific illustrators have the far trickier task of visualising not just hidden information but also ever increasing information and complexity. The twentieth century was fascinated with the atom and the stars which by today's standards are quite easy to understand - in most part thanks to illustrators like these - but also because of the reductionist method of 20th century (and earlier) thinking. But in moving beyond this reductionism, and by extension Modernism (I'm just going to go right ahead and skip past Post Modernism for everyone's sake), we're also moving away from the search for the unchanging and the absolute. Instead of looking at singular elements we're looking at them in the context of whole systems, processes and networks. I've been thinking about an inverted equivalent to these spreads pretty much since I started collecting, sketching them whenever the glimmer of an idea comes to me. Trying to articulate the needs of today's science using old techniques and visual styles. It's turning out to be much harder than I thought. But it's looking at science from this perspective is where the new and unknown is to be found. And the most exciting, for both science and design.
Colophon: It would be quite irresponsible for me to not mention the illustrators of all the works considering my affection for the unsung illustrators of yesteryear
Exploring the Weather: Lowell Hess
Updated illustration: Bryan Christie
Exploring under the Earth: John Polgreen
Updated illustration: Jason Lee
Exploring Mars: Lowell Hess
Updated map: NASA