![]() The frustration designers have felt over the decades can be neatly summed up in one word offered by Tauranac at a recent NYC subway map symposium: “Basta!” Or in a New York English, “Enough with all these colors already!”ĭesigner Massimo Vignelli Revisits and Defends His Iconic 1972 New York City Subway MapĪ Subway Ride Through New York City: Watch Vintage Footage from 1905 And it only took eighty years to get there. “All trains that share a trunk route are the same color”-a system that works beautifully. To solve the problem of different routes sharing the same colors, they assigned colors based on “trunk routes,” or the portion of the tracks that pass through Manhattan. The new designers used “a rainbow of 22 different colors to assign to each subway line,” Untapped Cities writes, “and gave the routes new names.”Ĭolors were further simplified in 1979 when John Tauranac and Michael Hertz designed the maps we know today. Confusion reigned into the 1960s, when Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, creator of an iconic 1972 subway map, completed “the Bible” of NYC transit design, the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual. Whatever the reasoning, the color-coding did not simplify signage in the rapidly expanding system, which became incomprehensible to riders when all three subways, and their different, numbering, and lettering systems, combined into an “untenable mess of overlapping sign systems,” Shaw writes. Yellow and blue are very natural colors: yellow like sunlight, green like grass, blue like water. ![]() The colors may have been chosen to stand out in artificial light, she speculates, and “not look dingy and have some kind of cheerful effect…. (See a subway map imagined with his color-coding system, above, by designer vanshnookenraggen.) One theory is that the system was designed to help non-English-speaking riders navigate the trains, but “there isn’t anything that we were able to find that says definitively ‘This is the reason why we are doing that,’” says New York Transit Museum curator Jodi Shapiro. It’s not entirely clear why Vickers chose the color scheme he did. ![]() Red stations include ‘Scarlet Red’ ‘Carmine Red’ and ‘Tuscan Red,’ just to name a few.” This level of specificity continues through each of the primary and secondary colors. Color names are based on paint chips and Berol Prismacolor pencils. the five primary colors, different shades are used within those families. “Though they’re grouped by color family, i.e. (See the chart above from 1930.) “The color variations within this system are subtle,” notes 6sqft. When construction on the IND system began, Vickers, now architect of the entire system and its lead designer, created a color-coding system to identify each station. Image by Elvert Barnes, via Wikimedia Commons Vickers, who took over the architectural duties in 1908.” The lettering and design of these tiled signs shifted, from 19th century gothic styles to 20th century art deco. “The first ‘signs’ in the New York City subway system were created by Heins & LaFarge, architects of the IRT,” who established the tradition of mosaic tiles on platform walls. The first two lines were built by the city and leased to private owners, with some elevated sections dating all the way back to 1885. “The current New York subway system was formed in 1940,” writes Paul Shaw in a comprehensive history of subway sign fonts, “when the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) and the IND (Independent) lines were merged.” Buried beneath the MTA’s modern exterior, with those colored circles adopted piecemeal over the chaotic 1970s, is a much older system-three systems, in fact-that had far less navigable signage. ![]() Therein lies the comforting lovey-screen time, climate control, maybe a nap in a window seat on the way home….īut as every New Yorker also knows, the color-coded subway system didn’t always have such a cheerful, Sesame Street-like look. (Provided it’s also the right train number or letter is making local stops (or express stops) has not been rerouted due to track work, death or injury, etc.) The psychological effect is not unlike a preschooler spotting her brightly-colored cubby at the end of a long day. There may be no more welcome sight to a New Yorker than their own Pantone-colored circle on an arriving subway train.
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