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Landsmen and seafarers / Maurice Lovell. London: George G. Harrap, 1945
“Finally, Neurath developed a system of graphic representation that made statistical data legible and accessible to non-specialized mass audiences. He wanted to bridge the gap between reading and seeing in an effort to accelerate the transmission of information and to reduce the role that convention, custom and education played in communication. He was acutely aware of the way in which habit contioned how we absorb knowledge -by the the early 1930s, he was adamant that graphic charts present information from left to right and from top to bottom, just as all European languages did (...) Finally, German and Soviet advocates of modernist graphic design reinforced his enthusiasm for mass communication. In Die neue Typographie (The New Typography, 1928), the graphic designer Jan Tschichold observed that 'as a rule, we not longer read quietly line by line, but glance quickly over the whole, and only if our interest is awakened do we study in detail'.”
Nader Vossoughian. Otto Neurath: the language of the global polis. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008 (p. 61-63)