Unimark's choice of Standard Medium is shocking given Vignelli's reputation—burnished by his passionate testimony in the documentary Helvetica—as a life-long proponent of Helvetica. It took longer for designers in New York to embrace it. Helvetica Medium Italic was added to describe the hours of operation for specific trains. The station walls were covered with simple glazed tiles in dull green, ochre, blue and other solid colors. He had left the firm the year before to establish Vignelli Associates, in partnership with his wife, Lella. Their lone image of signage within an underground railway system was, surprisingly, from the Philadelphia subway. Then, according to architectural critic Peter Blake, Vignelli and Noorda made their presentation, were “thanked and, apparently, forgotten.”. But the 1964/1965 World's Fair, in Flushing, Queens, pressured the NYCTA to improve its image and information graphics. Presumably, they were more focused on insuring that the signs were properly fabricated and installed than which sans serif was used. Certainly TA management would have been wary of antagonizing the Transport Workers Union and Amalgamated Transit Union in the wake of the 12-day transit strike that brought New York City to a halt in January 1966. Helvetica was the logical choice. Hence, the team had the opportunity to observe (as passengers would) both trains as they were entering the station, and then to observe them for a few moments as the two trains were standing still. That must have really stung the NYCTA. What did the Bergen Street Sign Shop workers use as a source for creating their painted and hand-cut stencil versions of Standard? It is very likely that a type house that had Standard in its repertoire in 1966 may have been loath to add Helvetica as well, given the costs involved and the fact that the two faces appear indistinguishable to most people. The supplement that he and his associate Peter Joseph created was more professional than the DeMasi version, though it too existed only in a photocopied, tape-bound form. At the time, Noorda—a Dutch designer who had moved to Italy in 1952 and gained a reputation for his work as art director of Pirelli—had his own design firm in Milan. Still, the opening of the Chrystie Street Connection did not go smoothly. Postmodernism had effectively exposed the subjective nature of the Modernist notion of neutral, rational and universal design and, in doing so, had undercut the principal reasons that many designers had given for choosing Helvetica over all other faces. It endures today despite a number of severe changes that make one wonder if it can even be attributed to them and Unimark anymore. The TA was glad to have Unimark's advice, but nothing more. Salomon's map was not as ambitious as his “Out of the Labyrinth” ideas. The new agency replaced the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority (MCTA), which had been formed three years earlier to oversee the commuter railroads, including the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. It is unclear whether Scannell's announcement at the MoMA symposium that the NYCTA had hired Unimark referred to the first contract or to the second contract the design firm had with the agency. The switchover was codified in 1980 via a revised edition of the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual—photocopied at a reduced size and bound with black tape—created by Ralph DeMasi, a staff architect. They used larger tiles than the IRT and BMT mosaics, though the IND's directional mosaic signs employed lighter sans serif capitals and were made up of smaller tiles. To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica. ”I wrote a memo about it and attached a technical article on legibility of texts against different backgrounds. Check it for free with Typograph. The only one of Salomon's ideas that was taken up by the TA (short for NYCTA) was his suggestion for a color-coded route map. Many of the informational signs warned against criminal, dangerous or unhealthy behavior: no peddling wares, no leaning over the tracks, no crossing the tracks, no smoking, no spitting. Several of the 1970s-era buses continued to operate into the early 1990s, but from 1980 on they were increasingly supplanted by boxy Grumman-Flexible and sleek GM RTS buses with LED displays. Instead of inking the type after it was locked up, it was sprayed with black lacquer or lampblack. As cars ”bombed“ on the outside and ”tagged“ on the inside rolled through the city, the subway woes and the graffiti explosion became intertwined in the public consciousness. It engaged Ladislav Sutnar to design exit signs for the stations but they were not “properly implemented” by the TA's sign shop—a portent of what Unimark was to face a decade later. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. The two men, who had first met in Chicago in 1958 while Vignelli was teaching at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology on a Moholy-Nagy Fellowship, shared a similar philosophy of design. At the same time, the Visual Graphic Corporation (VGC), manufacturers of the Typositor which set display phototype, offered faces ”similar to“ Helvetica. It was the first transportation signage system to use Helvetica without modifications. Helvetica celebrated its 50th anniversary with a movie, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and a book. At a certain point as both trains slowly entered, they were then directed (by hand signals as I recall) to stop—opposite each other. Neither assignment involved Noorda. ”In many stations,“ Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times, in 1979, ”the signs are so confusing that one is tempted to wish they were not there at all—a wish that is, in fact, granted in numerous other stations and on all too many of the subway cars themselves. ”If nothing else,“ Patricia Conway wrote in Print, ”the subway graffiti are a testimony to the monumental failure of TA officials and their design consultants to make the system legible.“ She went on to lambaste the transit agency for spending millions of dollars on anti-graffiti efforts rather than on capital improvements such as ”repairing inoperative doors, replacing burnt-out lights, securing rickety seats and maintaining or improving directional signs.“. The early 1970s were also the years when modern graffiti was born. For example, interior designer Stanley Abercrombie, in an essay accompanying the 1977–1978 Cooper-Hewitt Museum exhibition ”Subways,“ credited the signage to Vignelli and praised his use of a ”clear, smart Helvetica face.“ Similarly, the website of the Design Museum in London, gushing over Helvetica, declares: ”From the beautifully implemented New York Subway signage system by Vignelli to its usage on the lowly generic EXIT sign, the flexibility of the typeface seems to have no boundaries.“ Most astonishing of all, the authors of Subway Style—published by the New York Transit Museum of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—insist that the manual states the typeface for the signs is to be ”exclusively Helvetica.“, Helvetica finally became the official typeface for the New York City subway system signage in December 1989, when the MTA Marketing & Corporate Communications Division, the department in charge of its graphic standards, issued a new manual. 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