As any New Yorker—or visitor to the city—knows, the subway system is a labyrinth. What he most loved about it was its lack of sidebearings. By the end of June 1968, they were boasting that “3,000 new signs had been installed at 100 stations and old ones removed to reduce visual clutter.”. They commissioned a new logo for the agency from Sundberg-Ferar, an industrial design firm responsible for designing a new subway car, and they created special strip maps (set in Futura) for use on the No. At the time, Noorda—a Dutch designer who had moved to Italy in 1952 and gained a reputation for his work as art director of Pirelli—had his own design firm in Milan. “It had never occurred to us that they would carry out the proposals in their own shop,” Vignelli said. The electronic farecard—first used on buses in 1994 and then extended to the entire transportation system in 1995—forced the Marketing & Communications Division to revise its signage manual once again and to expand its design guidelines beyond signage to all forms of communication. history Their typeface was a modified version of Helvetica Bold, available in both positive and negative versions. And, most importantly, she was aware of Noorda's graphics for the Metropolitana Milanese from having served in 1964 on the United States selection committee for the 13th Triennale di Milano. Noorda established a spacing system for his custom typeface. Also, as part of the program, I had designed the T in the circle to identify and rename the system, and that featured a very simple, Helvetica-like T.” The MBTA signage was publicly introduced in August 1965, but the first renovated station—Arlington Street—did not open until October 1967. The latter included not only the MetroCards but stationery, maps, kiosks, booths and vehicles. In the 1960s European types were imported and distributed in the United States by two companies: Amsterdam Continental and Bauer Alphabets. The enamel signs were split in half horizontally with white lettering on a colored background at the top for the name of each station and black letters on a white background below for additional information about each stop. From the moment the MTA was born, the Rockefeller administration began making grandiose plans to modernize and coordinate the transit system. Some were temporary in nature—lettered on easel boards—and others were more permanent. Work on Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, designed by M. Duintjer and Kho Liang Le, began in 1962. information design. In contrast Plumb praised Noorda's graphics—including his use of a “modified grotesque” typeface—for the Milan metro, suggesting that they could be applied to New York City. The text was entirely typeset as were all the examples of signage. It was the first true integration of the IND and BMT and resulted in the creation of a new station at Grand Street, eight new routes and several new free-transfer points. In the summer Noorda flew to New York to carry out a detailed survey of the traffic flow at five key subway stations: Times Square, Grand Central Station, Broadway/Nassau, Jay Street and Queensborough Plaza. Three years later it was licensed by D. Stempel AG of Frankfurt (which owned shares in Haas) and renamed Helvetica. A month before the Chrystie Street Connection opened, the NYCTA publicly announced that it had hired Unimark to “devise a new system of signage.” The announcement was part of a presentation on the New York City subway by Daniel T. Scannell, one of the three TA commissioners, at the “Transportation Graphics: Where Am I Going? ”I wrote a memo about it and attached a technical article on legibility of texts against different backgrounds. Still, the opening of the Chrystie Street Connection did not go smoothly. These decals had a black background instead of a white or clear one, an indication that they were eventually intended to be used with white on black signs. The firm prepared a second revision of the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual for the NYCTA. Certainly by early 1968—if not fall 1967—Unimark had been rehired to prepare a comprehensive set of guidelines covering the design, fabrication and installation of signs for the subway system. At the same time, architect Harry Weese tapped Vignelli to design the graphics for the new Washington Metro. Passengers were unable to quickly absorb the new train routes and designations, nor the introduction of free transfer points. The TA team and I stood in mid-platform. Noorda returned to Milano to have prototype signs mocked up. Further inaccuracies were introduced during the tracing stage, depending upon the skill of the draftsman—unless a pantograph was employed. Previously, it had ignored Unimark's broader ideas about signage. Signs were allowed to be a wider variety of lengths and there was a wider variety of fabrication options, including silkscreened vinyl adhesive backing for updates to the porcelain enamel signs. The colored bands are all descendants of the black band the NYCTA errantly created in 1966. The early 1970s were the years when the subway system was probably at its lowest ebb, along with the city itself. The best one, Raleigh D'Adamo's submission, emulated London's seven-color coding system but was deemed “too complex for general use.” Goldstone later said that there was no winner “because a good map is not possible for a system which lacks intellectual order and precision”. The myth of Helvetica's preeminence began with Leslie Savan's 1976 Village Voice article, ”This Typeface Is Changing Your Life.“ Savan tried to explain the sudden pervasiveness of the sans serif typeface in the 1970s, focusing her attention on Vignelli and Lippincott & Margulies. And printers and type houses only bought new typefaces when they thought there would be sufficient demand for them or they filled a specific stylistic niche. This problem was resolved when Mergenthaler Linotype in Brooklyn began manufacturing Helvetica in February 1964. In October of that year, when the long-delayed 63rd Street tunnel was finally opened, its three new stations—63rd Street/Lexington Avenue, Roosevelt Island and 21st Street/Queensbridge—all sported 1968-designed interiors and Helvetica signage. How Do I Get There?” symposium held October 23 at MoMA. The trunk lines would be color-coded and identified by a letter and the branch lines by a derivative letter/number combination. For the IND Vickers also added a second set of modular tiles for the station names. Although Vignelli's explanation is an attractive one, especially in light of the graffiti explosion that overtook the city and the subway system by 1973, the truth is that the TA made the change to increase the legibility of the signs and first contemplated doing so sometime in 1972. According to Michael Bosniak, then the MTA's graphics manager, Jacques Nevard and Len Ingalls in public affairs requested that the ”Transit Authority maintenance shop manufacture prototypes of the 'drop-out' reverse lettering lettering“ for installation in three prototype stations in 1972–1973. Porcelain enamel signs made by the stencil process require stencil cutters and ”brushers“ with a high degree of skill. For the lettering, Forbes, who had a solo practice at the time, hired a young Matthew Carter (b. Although there was no mention of any change in the official typeface some of the sample illustrations used Helvetica instead of Standard. Helvetica Black Font on fonts.com. Industrial designer William Lansing Plumb, in the September/October 1965 issue of Print, compared the London, Milan and New York—but not Boston—subway systems. (Things were even worse than the Times realized—the AA line had been renamed the K.) However, by the end of the 1980s—thanks to an improving economy in New York City and a series of five-year capital programs dedicated to modernizing the stations—the revised Unimark signs managed to finally permeate most of the subway system. The two men, who had first met in Chicago in 1958 while Vignelli was teaching at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a Moholy-Nagy Fellowship, shared a similar philosophy of design. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Despite all of the excitement and recognition, few people know its true history in the United States . Lock-ups for the new logo in combination with the existing logos for each of the MTA's sub-units (e.g., Staten Island Railway, Bridges and Tunnels) were created using Helvetica Medium and Helvetica Medium Italic. The whole clash between the Bergen Street “sign painters”—as Vignelli called them—and the designers at Unimark reflected fundamentally different expectations between craftsmen and designers. Vignelli has often taken credit for the spread of Helvetica in this country. In late 1960, American Type Founders (ATF) began importing Adrian Frutiger's Univers and in 1961 it became available on monotype machines. ”In many stations,“ Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times, in 1979, ”the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all—a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous other stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves. While Vignelli was a strong believer in the virtues of Helvetica, Noorda was not as committed. A second reason is that by the end of the 1980s most MTA buses were using LED displays, which rendered the whole Standard/Helvetica debate moot. The switchover was codified in 1980 via a revised edition of the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual—photocopied at a reduced size and bound with black tape—created by Ralph DeMasi, a staff architect. The new Milan metro finally came to the notice of the American design community in 1965. 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