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Vignelli & the Color of New York

Wed., November 30, 2005

In 1998, a writer for The New York Times Sunday Magazine asked John C. Waddell, a Museum of Modern Art curator, what he’d like to acquire as the epitome of modern design: his choice was the signage for the city’s subway system.

“When I think of the East Side, it’s green; when I think of Lincoln Center, it’s red,” Waddell said, referring to the 4/5/6 and 1 lines, respectively depicted as green and red on the MTA’s New York City Subway Map. “Massimo and Lella Vignelli did that to my head.”

Born in Italy, the Vignellis moved to New York in the 1950s and in 1965, Massimo co-founded the design studio Unimark International. Only a year later, the firm was commissioned to design maps and signage for the subway. The MTA map circa 1966/1967 (depicted below) was the first to show each train route in a separate color, but despite Waddell’s comment, it’s not entirely clear Massimo himself chose the colors for the system. If he did, though, it’s astounding that an individual could be responsible for a collective memory.

Massimo Vignelli's New York City subway map, circa 1966.

I’ve seen at least one New York City guidebook that referred to the subway’s “green line” or “yellow line,” a misguided and oversimplified way to educate tourists or others new to the system—most often, trains with differing destinations run on a single colored line. Instead, the lines are correctly referred to by their associated letters or numbers.

But I admit to the feeling of geography associated with a line’s color that Waddell describes. Because of where I live now and before, and where I work, the red (1/2/3) and blue (A/C/E) lines color most of the city for me. Red still chiefly conjures the Upper West Side, while blue runs the gamut from my current neighborhood, down through Central Park West, Greenwich Village, all the way to JFK Airport. There is another, more oblique red-and-blue association; looking at the two colors wend their way through the boroughs on the map reminds me of the cat I dissected in Mr. Dewey’s high school bio class, the blood vessels injected with colored latex, red for arteries and blue for veins.

Other colors I associate with areas of the city are the green line (4/5/6), appropriately matched with the well-moneyed Upper East Side, and the bright tangle of gold (N/R/Q/W) and orange (B/D/F/V) at the bustling core of Manhattan and the Lower East Side. The shuttle to Times Square (the S), the shortest and straightest route in the system, is appropriately a brief, slate-gray slash, with the lighter gray L cutting a swath lower across Manhattan and hooking into Brooklyn.

New Yorkers adapted well enough to the sudden bursts of color in their commutes, but by the mid-1970’s, there was enough hubbub over the not-based-to-scale aspect of the new map that it was redesigned to the more geographically accurate style used today. A typical flap over Massimo’s map: See the rounded tan square in the left-center? That’s Central Park, which is in reality closer in aspect ratio to a golden rectangle.

Massimo Vignelli's New York City subway signage, circa 1966.

Although Massimo’s map may have been ultimately maligned as a victim of design over function, his subway signage has stayed more or less the same, with a letter or number in the Helvetica-mimic typeface Standard Medium boldly punctuating a circle. (For the station-name lettering, one big change was to reverse-out Massimo’s black-on-white lettering, shown in his 1966 illustration above, in order to discourage graffiti.)

And the colors remain, the most memorized design, intentionally or otherwise, in New York City.

Tags: Photo, Subway | Photos from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. | Comments have been closed.

On December 2, 2005 at 10:52 p.m., Andie Hine wrote:

very interesting. thank you!