 Czechoslovakia was not necessarily seen as a hotbed of graphic design, and it was. It was a hotbed of the avant-garde, which Sutnar represented. The work that he did was to take complexity and reduce it to great simplicity while not losing any of the intensity. Lettoslov Sutnar was a Renaissance man, but so were many other designers of his era. They went to school to learn how to make utensils, to make dishes, to make pots. This is an early one from the 1920s, and you can tell the porcelain is heavy. It's almost like pottery. This is later where the porcelain is finer, it's more geometric. As designers, they were also business people. They understood that the public needed certain things, and they might as well have them quite beautiful, as opposed to just mundane. Sutnar was in the forefront of that. How did he get into toys? He figured that there would be a market for it, where you stimulate the mind of the child to do their own creativity, rather than being handed a toy. It already gives you a form and says, OK, if I give you this form, what can you do with it? Put yourself into it. Now, with a toy like this, this is really about making your own city within the parameters of what materials you're given. Was that his intent to have kids learn, in a sense, architecture or space, form? Yes. The intent was to produce something that's exciting. These things should be for joy, happiness. Something that's always interested me about this particular industrial complex is the color. The orange and sky blue. A dad had a penchant. He had a preference. This is his orange, and it's... Sutnar orange. Yes, but I was not allowed to call it orange. I was allowed to call it cadmium. This is not orange. It doesn't look like it. Orange. This is cadmium. There are two periods of Sutnar. There's the Czech period, and then there's the American period. The Czech period really can stand on its own. It has its own idiom. It has its own style. It has the multidisciplinary activities that he was involved in. He was the director of the School of Graphics in Prague. He got into all kind of graphics, photography and art. He was exposed to that, and he had to teach it and do it. He was chosen by the Ministry of Education to do the World Fairs. Barcelona, Italy, the Paris World Fair. He was the designer for these, so his job was to show what the Republic was, what they do, what kind of style they had. He did design the interior of the Czechoslovak pavilion at the 1939 World Fair. The Czech pavilion was built, or at least was in the planning stages of being built. Lettoslav Sutnar was responsible for coming over and helping design the exhibitions. But prior to its opening, the Nazis marched into the Sudatian land and then into Czechoslovakia. So that was null and void. He and his friends put together a scenario where he was sent to New York to send back the materials. However, when he got to New York, he reported to the Czech government in exile and they proceeded to work. And he opened the Czech pavilion in 1939, even though there was no longer a Republic. When Dad came to America after the World Fair in 1939, he was trying to find out how to integrate how to. He wanted to make a living. Yes, he had to reinvent himself. He primarily, in New York, became the graphic designer as opposed to the industrial designer and the interior designer. He realized that American design had a certain chaotic quality to it, and his first instinct was to tame that chaos. And the way he ended up doing it was through this amazing marriage between him and Newt Lundberg Holm at Sweets Catalog. Lundberg Holm was a writer, a publicist. He brought Sutanar into the fold. Sutanar saw that Sweets, which was a collection of catalogs put together in a binder that went out to architects and interior designers and other people in the trade, was a mess. You know, it was very hard to navigate through this material. So what he did was he created templates to organize this material, nuts and bolts and pipes and gutters and leaders and you name it, so that there was a cover that would be inviting and not only inviting, it would tell you what was going on. It would be explanatory, descriptive. And he took that much further throughout the course of his career as a designer in New York. I became interested in Sutanar because he was one of the lost figures in graphic design history. He certainly produced a lot of material in terms of books, in terms of his own work. He recorded what was going on during his time, but because design history is very selective, he was kind of covered up by all the other key figures of the time. Sutanar is part of a group of designers that rose above the everyday, rose above the common place and have a certain heroic stature within the field of graphic design history and maybe even outside of the field of graphic design history because they were working with visual language in a way that, you know, the average sign painter or the average layout person was not. You know, when you look at Sutanar's work and you see this organizational skill coming through, one of the things that comes to mind is the web, the way the web is being designed now. The web designer uses many of the same tools that Sutanar did in doing his analog catalogs. There has to be the hierarchy. There has to be a way of changing scale. It would seem to me that if he were plopped down and given a job of designing a web page, he would do it instinctually and beautifully so. One of the things that is most exciting about Lettuce Love-Sutanar and probably the most visible thing he ever did and the thing he got the least attention for, at least historically speaking, is that he created a system for using area code numbers on letterheads when the Bell system introduced the area code in the late 50s. And this is a catalog of letterheads that he uses as examples of how to use this. And one of the things he introduced was the use of parentheses around the area code. The parentheses seem so intuitive, simple. I've always wondered why he didn't use dots after the numbers. His bracket gives it more separation. So it's easy. You're remembering these things. You can't comprehend it. What would he choose to do and not do as a designer? He would do anything to communicate. It was just a challenge. So he would do any job that was all? Any job that, you know, was challenging, interesting enough. Was he happy being a designer? He was very happy to be a designer because he could design anything. Just ask and he could, sure, I'll design it.