SUBWAY MAPS

The New York City Subway system is comprised of 26 lines that make stops at 468 stations on 660 miles of track. The oldest line–the IRT–began operating in 1904. Back then, the system was run by 3 competing businesses. “The result was a tangled spaghetti of train lines, a mess of a “system” that was almost comical in its complexity” (Bierut 136).

Outside the system, City dwellers lived and worked on streets and in neighborhoods that had been set in a near perfect grid. The contrast between above and below ground–between order and chaos–created problems in designing a map to navigate the subway system. The first serious attempt at designing a map for riders occurred after the three original lines were consolidated.

In 1958, graphic designer George Salomon designed a schematic at 45 degree diagonals featuring the Akzidenz Grotesk typeface (Ovenden 32). Salomon’s map looked great but critics derided the design’s lack of scale and geographic proportion. After a few revisions, the map was turned over to Massimo Vignelli.

Vignelli's Map

In 1972, Vignelli offered a redesigned map modeled after Harry Beck’s schematic for the London Underground. The result was a clear and intelligible map of great beauty. Vignelli simplified New York’s subway system by designating a unique color for each line and representing each stop with a dot. Each line was set at 45 and 90 degree angles. Once again, the critics cried foul. Unlike London, they argued, New York’s streets above ground had order and distances between streets and avenues had become second nature to New Yorkers (Bierut 137). Worse yet, Vignelli had decided to represent Central Park as a square despite the fact that the park is longer than it is wide (Bierut 137).


And so in 1979, the MTA formed a committee to take up the design again. This time, the emphasis was on topography. The new design brought geography to the surface but buried riders with too much information. The result was a large, two–sided map filled with callouts and detail. The goal was to help people navigate the system and find their way around town. But all the detail made the system intimidating at a time when the City needed riders. This map remains in circulation throughout the system today.

Jabbour's Map

Eddie Jabbour is trying to change that. Jabbour set out to design a map that restores Vignelli’s simplicity without sacrificing scale and topography. He wants a map his family, friends and 17 year old daughter can read. He started out by stripping the MTA’s map of all the unnecessary bus and commuter rail line information. This freed up space to create the detail required to help riders get around both above and below ground. Like Vignelli’s map, lines run at 45 degree diagonals. On Jabbour’s map, local and express trains run parallel to one another making it easy to identify each stop along the line. Jabbour cleaned up the legend, simplified the representation of transfers and set the type indicating each stop—Franklin—right side up.

Jabbour’s map suggests that a hybrid based on diagrammatic concepts with some useful geography could work as well for New York as it does elsewhere.

JABBOUR'S MAP can be found here: KICKMAP

Sources: RESEARCH: Michael Bierut’s, Seventy–nine Short Essays on Design. New York: 2007. Mark Ovenden’s, Transit Maps of the World. Penguin Books: 2003. “Can He Get There From Here?”, Rachel Corbett’s story on Eddie Jabbour in the New York Times (April 22, 2007).

PRINTING METHODS

In 1455, German born Johannes Gutenberg had an idea. He took a roller, an oil-based ink, metal type and paper and invented a process to reproduce words and language on a mass scale. The process became known as “Relief Printing” and enabled a single printer to set and reproduce multiple pages of text (Haslam 21).

Before his invention, virtually all documents and books were rendered either by hand or on individually carved woodblock. Relief printing put literature, books and in Gutenberg’s case, the Bible, into more hands.

He began the process by passing ink from a roller to the raised surface of a plate. He then pressed paper onto the metal type to make an impression. Today, this process is used to print beautiful wedding invitations and personal stationary.

Lithography

Three centuries would pass before the next major innovation in printing. In 1798, Alois Senefelder invented lithography. The process involved drawing or painting designs on limestone. An oil-based ink was applied to a stone with a roller; the ink adhered to the drawing, which was dry, and was repelled by the wet parts of the stone. The print was then made by pressing paper against the inked drawing.

Jules Cheret later experimented with the process by using different stones for each of the process colors-CMYK. By Cheret’s time, photography had been invented and the process of emulsion was carried over into printing. Using a light sensitive lithographic stone, Cheret produced work that combined illustration, text and color. By 1870, Cheret’s process became dominant in communicating ideas across Europe and the United States.

Offset Printing

In the 20th Century, Offset printing would transform the printing process. In offset printing, ink is transferred from the printing plate to a rubber-covered cylinder before being printed on paper (211). The process is quicker than either relief printing or lithography, allowing for the mass production of print jobs.

Offset printing also integrated type and images on paper. Relief printing had been the desired choice for producing type on paper. Lithography was widely used to produce images. Offset printing brought type and images together through a process called photosetting. “Where relief printing had created type as an impression, photosetting created type as an image” (Haslam 211). Offset printing did not replace relief printing or letterpress, but made these jobs cheaper and more efficient. Today offset printing is considered the most effective way of printing.

The advent of the computer, digitized images and text continue to make the printing process quicker, less expensive and more accessible. Today, Indigo and Laser printers produce high quality posters, brochures and annual reports at low cost.