New York Subway Map^323
Vignelli and AssociatesAt the end of a meeting in the early
1990 s where Vignelli and Associates
presented a comprehensive redesign
of the subway train interiors for the
New York Transit System, one of
the members of the selection
committee asked, “Mrs. Vignelli,
you once said in your book [Design:
Vignelli] that it is not pleasant to
work with the Transit Authority.
Why do you want to be involved in
a project like this again?” Without
hesitating Lella Vignelli responded,
“Because we are socially
responsible.” The unpleasantness
referred to was the design of the
New York City subway map in
1970 , one of Vignelli and Associates’
most well-known and difficult
achievements.
In 1965 Massimo Vignelli (b. 1931 ) moved to the United States
from Italy and cofounded Unimark with Bob Noorda, a Dutch graphic
designer and former art director at Pirelli in Milan. In the early 1960 s
Noorda designed informational graphics for the Milan subway system,
which helped Unimark get the job to create signage for the New York
Subway in 1966 , and which later led to designing the map.
Vignelli’s training as an architect in Italy in the mid- 1950 s and his
study with the Swiss graphic designer Max Huber made him a veteran of
the grid. In those early years Vignelli also began a long-lasting friendship
with Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose,and one of the top
semioticians in the world. “We were analyzing everything according to a
semiotic grid. It was just natural for us, like the ABCs.” Semiotics is the
study of symbology, the notion that every sign (word, letter, image, number,
etc.) is arbitrary and has meaning only when it represents an idea or thing.
Vignelli sees the semiotic grid as a relationship between semantics (the
meaning of the information), syntactics (its visual representation), and