![]() ![]() Vignelli, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 83, worked closely with his wife Leila on a wide range of design projects-his motto, “if you can design one thing, you can design everything.” A great many of those subway riders in 1972 may have disagreed. It later became part of the postwar design collection at the Museum of Modern Art.” In the video above, excerpted from the 2007 design documentary Helvetica, Vignelli revisits his transit map design (below), which he adopted from the London Underground map. ![]() The history of the NYC subway maps offers a specialized area for students of design, who must surely know the name Massimo Vignelli, the modernist designer who named the DC Metro and created the notorious 1972 NYC Transit map that, writes the MTA (Metro Transit Authority), “reimagined the MTA New York City Transit subway system as a neat grid of colored lines surrounded by a beige ocean.” The map will be familiar, and perhaps even a token of nostalgia, to New Yorkers from the era, who may also recall the complaints the MTA received for the map’s “geographic inaccuracies” and “aesthetic confusion.” Nonetheless, “design fans celebrated the map and made it a coveted souvenir of trips to New York. It’s many times truer of my adopted city for ten years, New York, whose more than 100-year-old subway system has given urban historians enough material for lifelong study. This is true of my hometown, Washington, DC, at least since the popular adoption of its Metro system in the 80s. Most every dweller of a city with a robust public transit system comes to identify their boundaries with the lines, angles, and colors of its subway map. ![]()
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