Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: Bildstatistisches Elementarwerk - Signaturen [14080.102]
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
This is a design system specification bound into the product it governs, and it does the two things a system needs: it fixes meaning to marks, and it shows that the same meaning takes different marks in different contexts. The Farben table is the key move - it defines the three colours semantically in ladders, so green, blue and red always run from primitive through old-culture to modern economy, and a reader who learns the ladder once reads every plate in the book without a legend. Laying the symbol sets out as a matrix, plates across and categories down, makes the coverage auditable at a glance and exposes any gap as an empty cell. Printing the pictograms at true size rather than enlarged means the sheet doubles as a proof of legibility.
Steal this when
Build this page whenever an icon set or colour scheme will be reused across many separate artefacts by more than one hand. Define colour by the concept ladder it carries rather than by hex value, show every mark at real size, and cross-reference each set to the artefact that uses it.