Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

were shelved, along with the neighborhood and geographic maps, victims
of budgets and bureaucracy.
But the overall system map and the pocket map survived.
Researching and learning from previous underground system maps, like
Beck’s London Underground map, Vignelli, too, organized his subway map
on a grid, orienting the “spaghetti work” of the railways to the verticals,
horizontals and forty-five-degree angles of the page. Each line had a
different color, bright primary colors, and either a number or letter
designation appearing at the beginning, at the end, and at intervals along
the route. Every station was listed. Every stop had a dot. A dot on the line
indicated the train stopped at that station. No dot, no stop. The web of
lines dominated the background of white abstracted land masses, with the
surrounding waters a mid-range gray, and parks designated with geometric
forms in a darker shade of gray. The map was distorted, with the central,
more congested areas larger and the outlying areas truncated. Vignelli used
layering, separation, and color to differentiate the planes of information.
This system of representation clarified what was important to the traveler:
how to go from point A to point B. The map bypassed the literal and
focused on the relationships inherent in the information and at the same
time exemplified the essence of orthodox modernist principles.
Soon after the system map was put into effect, the official at the
Transit Authority who originally commissioned Vignelli and Associates
retired. His replacement called for a new map. He criticized the Vignelli
map for lacking reference to the natural geography: the water was not
blue, the parks were not green. Vigorous campaigning to retain the award-
winning map eventually failed to convince this new official who, as Vignelli
described, “had the knife by the handle.” The map was replaced in 1979.