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Design

The Subway Map That Rattled New Yorkers

The  map  by Massimo Vignelli that was riddled with anomalies.Credit...Metropolitan Transportation Authority

No sooner had the Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced a new map of the New York subway system on Aug. 7, 1972, than complaints flooded in. Many stations seemed to be in the wrong places. The water surrounding the city was colored beige, not blue. As for Central Park, it appeared to be almost square, rather than an elongated rectangle, three times bigger than the map suggested, and was depicted in a dreary shade of gray.

The map was, indeed, riddled with anomalies, but that was the point. Its designer, Massimo Vignelli, had sacrificed geographical accuracy for clarity by reinterpreting New York’s tangled labyrinth of subway lines as a neat diagram. Each station was shown as a dot and linked to its neighbors by color-coded routes running at 45- or 90-degree angles. Mr. Vignelli had used his design skills to tidy up reality.

Design buffs have always loved his map for its rigor and ingenuity. When the future graphic designer Michael Bierut made his first trip to New York in 1976, he took one home to Ohio as a souvenir. But many New Yorkers were outraged by what they saw as the misrepresentation of their city, while tourists struggled to relate Mr. Vignelli’s design to what they found above ground. In 1979, the M.T.A. bowed to public pressure by replacing his diagrammatic map with a geographical one.

On the eve of its 40th anniversary, the story of the Vignelli map reads like a cautionary tale of a gifted designer expecting too much of the public or, as my grandmother used to say, being “too clever by half.” But its fate may have been different had the M.T.A. implemented Mr. Vignelli’s original scheme correctly.

Now 81, Mr. Vignelli moved to the United States in 1965 from his native Italy, and made an immediate impact in his new country. By 1972, he had established a New York design studio, Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Leila, and worked on the design of American Airlines’ corporate identity and signage systems for the Washington Metro and New York subway. An imposing personality with a highly disciplined approach to design, he so impressed the M.T.A. executives with his handling of the signage project that they invited him to redesign the subway map and rushed the result into production without submitting it to the usual rounds of consumer research.

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The diagrammatic map of the London Underground designed in 1933 by Henry C. Beck.Credit...London Transport Museum

But the M.T.A. only introduced one of four maps designed by Mr. Vignelli with the intention that, collectively, they would give passengers all the information they needed to navigate the subway. The diagrammatic System Map demonstrated how to get from A to B, but it was to be accompanied in each station by two Geographical Maps, one of the entire network and another of the local neighborhood, and a Verbal Map that explained in words how to go from place to place. Mr. Vignelli had never envisaged it being used without them.

Would his critics have felt differently had his System Map been reinforced by the other three? Perhaps, and even if they still disliked it, the others may have compensated for what they regarded as its shortcomings.

After all, there were other problems with the System Map. Mr. Vignelli had modeled it on the hugely popular 1933 diagrammatic map of the London Underground designed by Harry Beck, a freelance draughtsman who compiled it in his spare time. Beck’s “diagram,” as he called it, applied similar organizational principles, arguably with even greater rigor. Unlike him, Mr. Vignelli had included some geographical references, by identifying Central Park and areas like Manhattan and the Bronx. He has since regretted doing so, arguing that the map should have been wholly abstract, devoid of such distractions. But Beck’s design was gentler in style, particularly in its choice of typography, while Mr. Vignelli used the searingly modern font Helvetica.

The response to each map also reflected the architectural character of its city. London is such a huge, sprawling historical muddle that its citizens (like me) are generally relieved to see it simplified in Beck’s “diagram” and cheerfully forgive him for misrepresenting the wonky River Thames as being straight and Angel station as being level with Old Street, when it is further north. Whereas New Yorkers pride themselves on knowing their way around the orderly geometric grid of their streets, which explains why many of them felt they had nothing to gain from a shrunken Central Park and oddly located stations.

Here, the two maps illustrate the complexity of design’s relationship to the truth. In principle, we cannot be expected to trust anything that is not truthful, yet many of the greatest design feats have set out to deceive us, albeit for good reason. Just as the symbols and characters on your computer screen were designed to disguise the unfathomable mathematical coding of its programs, designers have devised maps to help us to make sense of befuddling terrain or transport networks. Londoners are willing to suspend disbelief when they see Beck’s “diagram,” because it is in their interest to accept its inaccuracies as expedient design ploys, while the New Yorkers who attacked Mr. Vignelli’s map felt deeply skeptical about it. Why would anyone want to redesign such an easily navigable city?

Mr. Vignelli has another theory. He believes that his System Map fell foul of what he calls the “verbal people,” whose ability to understand maps and other diagrams is less sophisticated than that of “visual people” like himself. “The verbal people, they can never read a map,” he said in the 2007 documentary “Helvetica.” “But the verbal people have one great advantage over the visual people, they can be heard.”

Even so, he had the last laugh. A year ago, the M.T.A. introduced “The Weekender,” an interactive version of the subway map on its Web site, and commissioned Mr. Vignelli to reinterpret his 1972 design for it. He did so on condition that it was described as a “diagram,” not a map, and the parks were erased, Central Park included.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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