I wanted to write something about the current New York City Subway Map:

It’s pretty bad. It’s beige, mostly. Beige and blue. It’s got a lot of weird charts and tables and pop-up bus routes all over it that no one looks at because it’s ridiculous to think about buses when you’re trying to read a subway map. It looks like this:

Back in the 70’s New Yorkers used a subway map designed by Massimo Vignelli. It was pretty funky looking—unapologetic high modernism with lots of straight lines and 45° angles. Manhattan was so distorted it looked like a big fat geometric blob. Also, every single subway line was represented—instead of just having a single line to represent the 4,5, and 6 lines, you had three separate lines stacked side by side. And each line had its own separate color (magenta, almost magenta, green, slightly darker magenta, blue…) It looked like this:

It was really cool looking and entirely unusable. The idea of representing every line may have been a good one, but because New Yorkers walk around a lot, a subway map has to have some relationship to the physical world above ground and Vignelli’s map had none. The circuit-board-diagram-as-subway-map model may have been OK for fat Londoners, but when you have to squish the long rectangle of Central Park into a square to make your map look nice, something is wrong. Vignelli’s map looks as though it would take days to walk from the east side of Manhattan to the west.

But to this day he is unrepentant. Here’s Vignelli in an outtake from the very fun film, Helvetica, wanting to push his design even further toward absraction.

Helvetica came out a few months ago. It chronicles the competing design philosophies that emerged worldwide in the last half of the 20th Century and tells that story by examining the use of the very ubiquitous typeface, Helvetica (slightly eclipsed these days by the Microsoft copy, Arial.)

Strangely enough, the original Vignelli map wasn’t set in Helvetica but a late 19th Century look-alike called Standard (to confuse matters even more, Standard is a version of the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk.) Today almost all New York City Subway signs are set in Helvetica. Other big cities like London and Paris do their signs up in their own custom typefaces but New York is having none of that—we’re too cheap, I guess. To cheap for a unique identity…

But back to maps. The best alternative offered up to the current subway map is from Eddie Jabbour’s Kick Design studios. Jabbour’s Kick Map combines the best of the Vignelli map with the best of the current design. Why the MTA decided to pass on the Kick Map (he presented it to them a couple of years ago) is beyond me. Here’s what it looks like.

Here’s the even better looking pocket version.

It’s so cold outside. I’ve lost my love of Winter. A cold snowless Winter…

[EDIT: Arial was actually designed for Monotype (not Microsoft) in 1982. It was first bundled with Windows 3.1 in 1992. Also, the Vingnelli Map looks like it was done in Helvetica although the original signage was in Standard.]

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.