ma graphic design information design elective supporting material
DESCRIPTION
Supporting research and development for the Information Design elective of my MA Graphic Design. The project examines the graphic and design elements of 6 metro system maps: London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Moscow and Tokyo. The eventual outcome compares the colours used for each of the lines on the maps.TRANSCRIPT
Elective AInformation DesignSupporting Material
Eleanor Maclure
MA Graphic DesignPart Time Unit 2.1
MA Graphic DesignPart TimeUnit 2.1Elective AInformation Design Supporting Material
Elective AInformation DesignSupporting Material
Eleanor Maclure
Elective AInformation Design
2
Metro Maps
Berlin
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Reference: Network map of the S- and U-Bahn. http://www.bvg.de/index.php/en/17099/name/Network+Map.html [Accessed 05/12/10].
3
Elective A Supporting Material
London
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8 8 6
2
4
4
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41
3
2
43
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1
3
3
59 7 7Special fares apply
5
5
6
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4River Thames
A
B
C
D
E
F
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 3 4 5 76 8 9
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B
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F
Transport for LondonMAYOR OF LONDON
Transport for LondonThis diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck · 05.10
Correct at time of going to print, May 2010
AmershamChorleywood
Mill Hill East
Rickmansworth
Perivale
KentishTown West
CamdenRoad
Dalston Kingsland
Hackney CentralWanstead Park
Vauxhall
Hanger Lane
Edgware
Burnt Oak
Colindale
Hendon Central
Brent Cross
Golders Green
West Silvertown
Pontoon Dock
London City Airport
Woolwich Arsenal
King George V
Hampstead
Belsize Park
Chalk Farm
Chalfont &Latimer
Chesham
New Cross Gate
Moor Park
NorthwoodNorthwoodHills
Pinner
North Harrow
Custom House for ExCeL
Prince Regent
Royal Albert
Beckton Park
Cyprus
Gallions Reach
Beckton
Watford
Croxley
Fulham Broadway
LambethNorth
HeathrowTerminal 4
Harrow-on-the-Hill
KensalRise
Canonbury
BethnalGreen
Westferry
SevenSisters
Blackwall
BrondesburyPark
HampsteadHeath
HarringayGreen Lanes
LeytonstoneHigh Road
LeytonMidland Road
NorthwickPark
PrestonRoad
RoyalVictoria
WembleyPark
Rayners Lane
Watford High Street
RuislipGardens
South Ruislip
Greenford
Northolt
South Harrow
Sudbury Hill
Sudbury Town
Alperton
Pimlico
Park Royal
North Ealing
Acton Central
South Acton
Ealing Broadway
Watford Junction
West Ruislip
Bushey
Carpenders Park
Hatch End
North Wembley
West Brompton
Ealing Common
South Kenton
Kenton
Wembley Central
Kensal Green
Queen’s Park
Gunnersbury
Kew Gardens
Richmond
Stockwell
Bow Church
Stonebridge Park
Harlesden
Camden Town
Willesden Junction
Headstone Lane
Parsons Green
Putney Bridge
East Putney
Southfields
Wimbledon Park
Wimbledon
Island Gardens
Greenwich
Deptford Bridge
South Quay
Crossharbour
Mudchute
Heron Quays
West India Quay
Elverson Road
Oakwood
Cockfosters
Southgate
Arnos Grove
Bounds Green
Theydon Bois
Epping
Debden
Loughton
Buckhurst Hill
WalthamstowQueen’s Road
Woodgrange Park
Leytonstone
Leyton
Wood Green
Turnpike Lane
Manor House
Stanmore
Canons Park
Queensbury
Kingsbury
High Barnet
Totteridge & Whetstone
Woodside Park
West Finchley
Finchley Central
Woodford
South Woodford
Snaresbrook
Hainault
Fairlop
Barkingside
Newbury Park
East Finchley
Highgate
Archway
Devons Road
Langdon Park
All Saints
Tufnell Park
Kentish Town
Neasden
Dollis Hill
Willesden Green
South Tottenham
Swiss Cottage
ImperialWharf
Brixton
Kilburn
West Hampstead
Blackhorse Road
Acton Town
CanningTown
Finchley Road
Highbury &Islington
Canary Wharf
Stratford
FinsburyPark
Elephant & Castle
Stepney Green
Barking
East HamUpton Park
Plaistow
Poplar
West Ham
Upper Holloway
PuddingMill Lane
Kennington
Borough
Elm ParkDagenhamEast
DagenhamHeathway
Becontree
Upney
Heathrow Terminal 5
Finchley Road& Frognal
Crouch Hill
Northfields
Boston Manor
South Ealing
Osterley
Hounslow Central
Hounslow East
Clapham North
Oval
Clapham Common
Clapham South
Balham
Tooting Bec
Tooting Broadway
Colliers Wood
South Wimbledon
Arsenal
Holloway Road
Caledonian Road
Morden West Croydon
HounslowWest
Hatton Cross
HeathrowTerminals 1, 2, 3
ClaphamJunction
WestHarrow
BrondesburyCaledonian
Road &Barnsbury
TottenhamHale
WalthamstowCentral
HackneyWick
Homerton
WestActon
Limehouse EastIndia
Crystal Palace
ChiswickPark
RodingValley
GrangeHill
Chigwell
Redbridge
GantsHill
Wanstead
NorthGreenwich
Ickenham
TurnhamGreen
Uxbridge
Hillingdon Ruislip
GospelOak
Mile End
Bow Road
Bromley-by-Bow
Upminster
Upminster Bridge
Hornchurch
Norwood Junction
Sydenham
Forest Hill
Anerley
Penge West
Honor Oak Park
Brockley
Harrow &Wealdstone
Cutty Sark for Maritime Greenwich
RuislipManor
Eastcote
Wapping
Shadwell
New Cross
CanadaWater
Surrey Quays
Whitechapel
Lewisham
Kilburn Park
Regent’s Park
KilburnHigh Road
EdgwareRoad
SouthHampstead
GoodgeStreet
Shepherd’s BushMarket
Goldhawk Road
Hammersmith
Bayswater
Warren Street
Aldgate
Euston
Farringdon
BarbicanRussellSquare
Kensington(Olympia)
MorningtonCrescent
High StreetKensington
Old Street
St. John’s Wood
Green Park
BakerStreet
NottingHill Gate
Victoria
AldgateEast
Blackfriars
Mansion House
Cannon Street
OxfordCircus
BondStreet
TowerHill
Westminster
TottenhamCourt Road
PiccadillyCircus
CharingCross
Holborn
Tower Gateway
Monument
Moorgate
Leicester Square
London Bridge
St. Paul’s
Hyde Park Corner
Knightsbridge
StamfordBrook
RavenscourtPark
WestKensington
NorthActon
HollandPark
Marylebone
Angel
Queensway MarbleArch
SouthKensington
Earl’sCourt
SloaneSquare
Covent Garden
LiverpoolStreet
GreatPortland
Street
Bank
EastActon
ChanceryLane
LancasterGate
Warwick AvenueMaida Vale
Fenchurch Street
Paddington
BaronsCourt
GloucesterRoad St. James’s
Park Temple
Latimer Road
Ladbroke Grove
Royal Oak
Westbourne Park
Bermondsey
Rotherhithe
ShoreditchHigh Street
Dalston Junction
Haggerston
Hoxton
Wood Lane
Shepherd’sBush
WhiteCity
King’s CrossSt. Pancras
EustonSquareEdgware
Road
Waterloo
Southwark
Embankment
Tube map
Key to lines Check before you travelBakerloo
Central
No special arrangements
Circle
ChigwellGrange HillRoding Valley
Served until about 2400
Hammersmith& City
No special arrangements
Canary WharfJubilee Step-free interchange between Underground, Canary Wharf DLR andHeron Quays DLR stations at street level
Metropolitan Chesham Change at Chalfont & Latimer on most trains
Northern
Blackfriars
Cannon Street
Underground station closed until late 2011Open until 2100 Mondays to Fridays.Closed Saturdaysand Sundays
District Blackfriars
Cannon Street
Kensington (Olympia)
Underground station closed until late 2011Open until 2100 Mondays to Fridays.Closed Saturdaysand Sundays
Camden Town
Charing Cross branch
Mill Hill East
Open for interchange and exit only from 1300 until 1730 Saturdays and SundaysChange at Kennington at off-peak times if travelling towards or from MordenChange at Finchley Central at off-peak times
Piccadilly Covent Garden
Eastcote to Uxbridge
Heathrow Terminal 4
Hounslow West
Turnham Green
A short walk from either Leicester Square (6 minutes) or Holborn (9 minutes)
Not served by Piccadilly line trains early mornings
Open until 2400 Mondays to Saturdays and until 2330 Sundays. Trains may wait for eight minutes before continuing to Terminals 1,2,3
Step-free access for wheelchair users only
Served by Piccadilly line trains early mornings and late evenings only
No special arrangements
No special arrangements
Heron Quays
West India Quay
Overground
DLR
Victoria
Waterloo & City Bank to Waterloo
Step-free interchange between Heron Quays and Canary Wharf Underground station at street level.
Not served by DLR trains from Bank towards Lewisham at peak times
Open 0615 until 2148 Mondays to Fridays and 0800 until 1830 Saturdays. Closed Sundays and public holidays
Served 0700 until 2345 Mondays to Saturdays and 0800 until 2345 Sundays
Reference: Standard Tube Map. http://www.tfl.gov.uk/gettingaround/1106.aspx [Accessed 01/11/10].
4
Moscow
Metro Maps
Reference: Moscow Metro Map, 2009. http://vector-images.com/clipart.php?id=6366 [Accessed 21/12/10].
5
Elective A Supporting Material
New York
DYKERBEACHPARK
WESTCHESTER
THE BRONX
NAS
SAU
QU
EEN
S
NASSAU QUEENS
QUEENSBROOKLYN
J a m a i c aB a y
Ha
r l em
Ri v e r
Ea
s t Ri v e r
E a s t Ri v e r
Lo
ng
I
sl
an
d S
ou
nd
Hu
ds
on
Ri
ve
r
Q33
Q72
Q47
M60
M60 M60Q33Q47Q48Q72
Q33
Q48
Q10
Q10
B15Q10
AIRTRAIN JFK
AIRTRAIN JFK
Q3
Q3
14
AirTrain stops/terminal numbers
7
5/6
8
2/3
LIRR
LIRR
LIRR
LIRR
LIRR
Met
ro-N
orth
Metro-North
Metro-North
Met
ro-N
orth
LIRR
PATH
PATH
Amtrak
Amtra
k
Amtrak
Amtrak
NJTransit • Amtrak
PATH
Bowling Green4•5
Broad St J•Z
Rector StR
World TradeCenter
E
DeKalb AvB•Q•R
Hoyt St2•3
Clark S
t2• 3
Union StR
Carroll S
tF• G
Bergen
St
F• G
Broad St J•Z
York St
F
CityHallR
Rector StR
Franklin St1
Canal St1
Prince StN•R
Houston St1
14 St A•C•E
50 St1
50 StC•E
59 StColumbus Circle
A•B•C•D•1
66 St Lincoln Center
1
72 St1•2•3
79 St1
86 St1
96 St1•2•3
103 St1
CathedralPkwy
(110 St )1
116 St ColumbiaUniversity
1
137 StCity
College1
145 St1
157 St1
175 StA
181 StA
190 StA
Dyckman St A
238 St1
Norwood205 StD
Mosholu Pkwy4
Bedford Pk BlvdLehman College
4
Kingsbridge Rd4
Fordham Rd4
Allerton Av2•5
183 St4
Burnside Av4
176 St4
Mt Eden Av4
170 St4
174 St2•5
Bronx ParkEast
2•5
Pelham Pkwy2•5
Freeman St2•5
Simpson St2•5
E 180 St2•5
West Farms Sq
E Tremont Av2 •5
167 St4
161 St
Yankee Stadium
B •D •4
Van Cortlandt Park242 St
1
Lexington
Av/63 St
F
14 St–U
nion Sq
L• N
• Q• R
• 4• 5• 6
L
• N• Q
• R
3 Av
L 1 Av
L
8 St-NYUN•R
Christopher St
Sheridan Sq1
Canal StJ•N•QR•Z•6
Canal StA•C•E
Spring St6
Spring StC•E
W 4 St Wash Sq A•B•C•D•E•F•M
8 Av
L
Long Island City
Court Sq
G
QueensPlaza
E •M•R
69 St7
52 St7 46 St
Bliss St 740 St
Lowery St
733 St-Rawson St
7
Woodside
61 St7
36 StM•R
90 St–Elmhurst Av7
Junction Blvd 7 Q72 LGA Airport
103 St–Corona Plaza7
111 St 7 • Q48 LGA Airport
Elmhurst
Av
M• R
Grand Av
Newtown
M
• R Woodhaven Blvd
M
• R 63 D
r–Rego Park
M
• R• Q72
LGA Airp
ort
Forest Hills
71 Av
E• F• M• R
75 Av
E• F Bria
rwood
Van W
yck Blvd
E• F
Sutphin BlvdF
Parsons Blvd F
169 StF
Jamaica
Van Wyc
kE
Kew Gard
ens
Union Tpke
E
• F67 Av
M
• R
21 StQueens-
bridgeF
39 AvN•Q
Steinway StM•R
46 St M
•R
Northern Blvd
M•R
65 St
M•R
74 St–Broadway 7
82 St–Jackson Hts
Q33 LGA Airport • 7
36 AvN•Q
30 AvN•Q
Astoria BlvdN•Q
AstoriaDitmars Blvd
N•Q
23 St–Ely AvE•M
6 Av L 14 St
1•2•3
18 St1
14 St F•M
23 StF•M
23 St1
23 StC•E
23 StN•R
33 St6
Hunters Point Av7•LIRR
Vernon BlvdJackson Av
7
21 StG
Queensboro Plaza
N•Q•7
45 RdCourt House Sq
7
68 StHunter College6
77 St6
86 St4•5•6
96 St6
103 St6
110 St6
Central ParkNorth (110 St) 2•3
116 St6
72 StB•C
81 St–Museum of Natural History B•C
86 St B•C
96 StB•C
103 StB•C
Cathedral Pkwy(110 St)B•C
116 StB•C
125 StA•B•C•D
125 St2•3 • M60 LaGuardia Airport
125 St4•5•6
135 StB•C
135 St2•3
116 St2•3
3 Av138 St6
Brook Av
6
Cypress Av
6
E 143 St
St Mary’s St
6145 StA•B•C•D
191 St1
Bedford Pk BlvdB•D
Kingsbridge RdB•D
Fordham RdB•D
182–183 StsB•D
Tremont Av B•D
174–175 StsB•D
170 StB•D
Morris Park5
Pelham Pkwy5
Burke Av2•5
Gun Hill Rd 2•5
219 St 2•5
225 St2•5
233 St2•5
Nereid Av2•5
Wakefield 241 St2
Gun Hill Rd5
Baychester Av5
EastchesterDyre Av5
167 StB•D
E 149 St6
Longwood Av6
Hunts Point Av6
Whitlock Av6
Elder Av6
Morrison Av Soundview 6
St Lawrence Av6
Castle Hill Av6
Zerega Av6
Middletown Rd6
Buhre Av6
Pelham Bay Park6
Parkchester6
181 St1
155 S
t
B
• D15
5 St
C
163 S
t
Amsterd
am Av
C
145 St3
149 S
t–Grand
Concourse
2• 4• 5
Harlem148 St3
57 StF
57 St-7 AvN•Q•R
49 StN•Q•R
7 AvB •D
•E
28 St1
28 St N•R
28 St6
23 St6
Astor Pl 6
BoweryJ• ZEast
BroadwayF
2 Av
F
Bleecker St
6B’w
ay–Lafaye
tte St
B• D
• F• M
Essex
St
F
• J• M• Z
Delance
y St
Grand St B•D
Prospect AvR
25 StR
36 StD•N•R
45 StR
53 StR
59 StN•R
8 Av
N
Fort Hamilto
n
PkwyN
New Utre
cht Av
N 18 Av
N20
AvN
Bay Pkwy
N
Kings
HwyN
Avenue U N86 St
N
62 St
D
71 St
D
79 St
D
18 Av D
20 Av D
Bay Pkwy
D 25 AvD
Bay 50 StD
Coney IslandStillwell Av
D•F•N•Q
55 St
D
50 St
DFort Hamilto
n
PkwyD
9 Av
DDitm
as Av
F
18 Av
F
Avenue I
F
Bay
PkwyF
Bay Ridge AvR
77 StR
86 StR
Bay Ridge95 St
R
Jay St Borough Hall
A•C•F
Lafayette AvC
ParkPlS
Fulton StG
Smith
9 Sts
F• G
4 Av–
9 St
F• G• R 7 A
vF• G
15 St
Prospect P
arkF• G
Fort HamiltonPkwy
F•G
Church AvF• G
Avenue N
F Avenue P
FKings H
wy
F
Avenue U
F
Avenue X
FNeptune Av
F
West 8 StNY AquariumF•Q
Ocean PkwyQ
Brighton BeachB•Q
Sheepshead Bay
B• Q
Neck Rd
B• Q
Avenue U
B• Q
Kings Hwy
B• Q
Avenue M
B• Q
Avenue J
B• Q
Avenue H
B• Q
Newkirk Av
B• Q
Cortelyo
u Rd
B• Q
Beverle
y Rd
B• Q
Church Av
B• QFlatbush
Av
Brooklyn C
ollege
2• 5
Newkirk Av
2• 5
Beverly
Rd
2• 5
Church Av
2• 5
Winthrop St
2• 5
Sterling St 2•5
President St 2•5
CanarsieRockaway PkwyL
East 105 StL
Aqueduct North Conduit Av
A
Aqueduct RacetrackA
Van Siclen AvCLiberty
AvC
Ozone ParkLefferts BlvdA
111 StA
104 StA
Rockaway Blvd A
88 St A
80 StA
Grant AvA
Euclid AvA•C
Shepherd AvC Howard Beach
JFK Airport AAtlantic Av
L
Alabama AvJ
New Lots Av L B15 JFK Airport
Crescent StJ•Z
Norwood Av Z rush hrs, J other times
Cleveland St J
Bushwick Av
Aberdeen St
L
Wilson Av
L
DeKalb Av
LJe
fferso
n St
L
Flushing Av
J• MLorim
er St
J• MBroadway
G
Nassau Av
G
Greenpoint Av
G
Lorimer S
t
L Graham
Av
L Grand St
L Montrose
Av
L Morgan Av
L
Livonia Av L
Sutter
AvL
Nostrand Av
A •CFranklin Av
C•S
Kingston
Throop Avs
C
Utica Av
A •C
Ralph Av
C
Chauncey St
Z rush hours,
J other times
MyrtleWyckoff AvsL•M
Halsey St
J Gates Av
Z rush hours,
J other times
Kosciuszko St
JMyrtle Av
J •M•Z
Central Av M
Seneca AvM
MyrtleWilloughby Avs G
Flushing Av
GMarcy Av
J• M• Z
Metropolitan Av G
Bedford Av
L
Fresh Pond RdM
Halsey
St
L
Rockaway
AvC
Broad
way
Junc
tion
A
• C• J•
L• Z
Parkside AvB•Q
Prospect Park B•Q•S
Botanic Garden S
Clinton
Washington AvsG
Classon AvG
Hewes
St J• M
Bedford
Nostrand AvsG
Clinton
Washington Avs
C
HoytSchermerhorn
A•C•G
Lawrence StR
Kingston Av3
Franklin Av
2• 3• 4• 5Beach44 StA
Beach 36 StA
Beach 25 StA
Far RockawayMott Av
A
Broad Channel
A•S
Beach 67 StA
Beach 60 StA
Beach 90 StA•S
Beach 98 StA•S
Beach 105 StA•S
Rockaway ParkBeach 116 St
A•S
BroadwayN•Q
Knickerbocker Av M
Middle VillageMetropolitan AvM
Forest AvM
High StA•C
Atlantic Av B•Q•2•3•4•5•LIRR
Whitehall StSouth FerryR
Bowling Green4•5
Wall St4•5 Wall St
2•3
Fulton StBroadway-Nassau
Chambers St1•2•3
Park Place 2•3
Chambers StJ•ZBrooklyn BridgeCity Hall 4•5•6
Chambers St A•C
Atlantic
Av-Pac
ific St
D• N• R
• LIRR
Bergen
St2• 3
7 Av
B• Q
Nevins St2•3•4•5
Borough H
all
2• 3• 4• 5
Court StR
Grand A
rmy
Plaza
2• 3Eas
tern Pkw
y
Brookly
n Muse
um2• 3
34 StPenn
Station A•C•E•LIRR
42 StPort AuthorityBus Terminal
A•C•E Times Sq-42 St
N•Q•R•S•1•2•3•7Grand Central42 StS•4•5•6•7•Metro-North
47–50 StsRockefeller CtrB•D•F•M
34 StPenn
Station1•2•3•LIRR
34 StHerald Sq
B•D•FM•N•Q•R
42 StBryant PkB•D•F•M
5 Av 7
Lexington Av/53 St E•M
59 St 4•5•6
51 St 6
Lexington Av/59 StN•Q•R
5 Av/53 StE•M
5 Av/59 StN•Q•R
125 St1
168 St A•C•1 A•C
Dyckman St1
Inwood207 St
A
215 St1
3 Av–149 St2•5
Woodlawn4
Marble Hill225 St1
231 St1
75 St–Elderts Ln Z rush hours, J other times
Cypress Hills J
85 St–Forest Pkwy J
Woodhaven Blvd J•Z
104 St Z rush hours, J other times
111 StJ
121 St Z rush hours, J other times
Sutphin BlvdArcher AvJFK AirportE•J•Z•LIRR
Jamaica179 StF
Jamaica Center Parsons/ArcherE•J•Z
Jackson Hts
Roosevelt Av
E •F •M•R • Q33 Q47
LGA Airport
FlushingMain St
7
Nostrand Av3
Crown HtsUtica Av3•4
Saratoga Av 3
Rockaway Av 3
Junius St 3
Pennsylvania Av3
Van Siclen Av3
New Lots Av3
Sutter Av–Rutland Rd3
A•C•J•Z2•3•4•5
Open 11am-7pmon racing days
Westchester Sq East Tremont Av 6
Intervale Av 2•5
Prospect Av 2•5
Jackson Av 2•5
Mets–Willets Point7 • Q48 LGA Airport
Van Siclen Av Z rush hrs, J other times
138 St–GrandConcourse4•5
M60 LaGuardia Airport
M60 LaGuardia Airport
M60 LaGuardia Airport
M60 LGA Airport
Rector St1
Cortlandt St1
Cortlandt St R
South Ferry1
World TradeCenter
E
207 St 1
rushhours
rushhours
S
Rooseve
lt
Isl
and
F
northboundserviceonly
Stat
en Is
land
Fer
ry
summer only
QUEENSMIDTOWNTUNNEL
MARINE PARKWAY-
GIL HODGESMEMORIALBRIDGE
CR
OS
S B
AY
VE
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AN
S’
ME
MO
RIA
L
BR
IDG
E
BRONX-WHITESTONE BRIDGE
HENRY HUDSO
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BRIDG
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BROOKLYN-BATTERY TUNNEL
BRIDGE
VERRAZANO-NARROWS
BR
IDG
E
RO
BE
RT
F K
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NE
DY
THROGS NECK BRIDGE
GEO. WASHINGTONBRIDGE
LINCOLN TUNNEL
HOLLAND TUNNEL
MANHATTAN BRIDGE
BROOKLYN BRIDGE
QUEENSBORO BRIDGE
MA
LC
OL
M X
BL
VD
(LE
NO
X A
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NOSTRAND AV
BR
OA
DW
AY
BROADWAY BRIDGE
ST
NIC
HO
LA
S A
V
BR
OA
DW
AY
BR
OA
DW
AY
BROAD
WAY
SE
VE
NT
H A
V
VA
RIC
K S
T
L IVONIA
AV
WEST
CH
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R A
V
E 138 ST
LE
XIN
GT
ON
AV
PA
RK
AV
S
LA
FA
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TT
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T
EASTERN PARKWAY
SO
UT
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RN
BL
VD
WESTC
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ST
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AV
S
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TH
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N B
LV
D
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PL
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AD
E W
HITE P
LAIN
S RD
JER
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E A
V
MANHATTAN AV
UNION AV
LAFAYETTE AV
WEST END LINE
DELANCEY ST
BROADWAY
FULTON ST
JAMAIC
A AV
MYRTLE AV
VAN SINDEREN AV
WYCKOFF AV
BUSHWICK AV
N 7 ST
HOUSTON ST
R U TGERS ST
JAY
ST
S
MIT
H S
T
NINTH ST
MCDONALD AV
CULVER LINE
MCDONALD AV
FO
UR
TH
AV
86 ST
NEW
UTR
ECH
T AV
FO
UR
TH
AV
53 ST
HILLSID
E AV
41 AV 63 ST
SIX
TH
AV
FLATBUSH AV
E 15 ST
BRIGHTON LINE
E 16 ST
GR
AN
D C
ON
CO
UR
SE
QUEENS BLVD
QUEENS BLVD
ARCHER AV
LIBERTY A
V
PITKIN AV
FULTON ST
FULTON ST
CH
UR
CH
ST
S
IXT
H A
V
GREENWICH AV
EIG
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H A
V
CE
NT
RA
L P
AR
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ST
NIC
HO
LA
S A
V
FO
RT
WA
SH
ING
TON
AV
BRO
ADW
AY
FO
UR
TH
AV
61 ST SEA BEACH LINE 63 ST
WEST 8 ST
BROADWAY
31 ST
60 ST
BROAD
WA
Y
BR
OA
DW
AY
BR
OA
DW
AY
QUEENS BLVD
ROOSEVELT AV
FLATBUSH AV
WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE
14 ST
42 ST
PA
LIS
AD
E A
V
W 254 ST
IND
EP
EN
DE
NC
E A
V
HE
NR
Y H
UD
SO
N P
KW
Y
BROAD
WAY
231 ST
IRWIN AV
VAN CORTLANDT
PARK SO
WA
LD
O A
V
MO
SH
OLU
PKW
Y
BA
ILE
Y A
V
FORDHAM RD
PELHAM PKWY
CR
OT
ON
A A
V
PR
OS
PE
CT
AV
GR
AN
T H
WY
E 169 ST
CLAREMONT PKWY
180 ST
TREMONT AV
E TREMONT AV
WE
BS
TE
R A
V
BA
INBR
IDGE
TH
IRD
AV
225 ST
BRUCKNER EXPWY
BRUCKNER
EXPW
Y
ST
AN
NS
AV
ELDER AV
STORY AV
ST LAWRENCE AV
ROSEDALE AV
WHITE PLAINS RD
WHITE PLAINS RD
SOUNDVIEW AV
172
ST
CASTLE HILL AV
ZEREGA AV
EASTC
HESTER
RD
225 ST
HUTCHINSO
N PKWY
ALLERTON AV
BO
ST
ON
RD
WARING AV
WILLIAMSBRIDGE RD
BURKE AV
222 ST
LA
CO
NIA
AV
233 ST CO-OP CITY
BARTOW A
V
MIDDLETOWN RD
MORRIS
PARK AV
UNIONPORT RD
BARN
ES AV
BR
OA
DW
AY
NAGLE AV
10 A
V
FT
WA
SH
AV
RIV
ER
SID
E D
R
RIV
ER
SID
E D
R
145 ST
135 ST
ST NICHOLAS AV
AM
ST
ER
DA
M A
V
10 AV
FIF
TH
AV
5 A
V
MA
DIS
ON
AV
M
AD
ISO
N A
V
PA
RK
AV
TH
IRD
AV
3 A
V
SE
CO
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AV
2 A
V
2 AV
1 AV
FIR
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AV
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AL
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N S
T
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RK
AV
WE
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D A
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11 AV
72 ST
CO
LU
MB
US
AV
66 ST 66 ST
12 AV
WE
ST S
T
GR
EE
NW
ICH
ST
WE
ST S
T
53 ST
E 8 ST
AV
A
AV
B
AV
D
BANK ST
E 2 ST
CHARLTON ST
GRAND ST
E BWAY
MADISON ST
SOUTH S
T
PEARL ST
WATE
R ST
ASTORIA BLVD
NORTHERN BLVD
DITMARS BLVD
111 ST
112 ST
ST
EIN
WA
Y S
T
48 ST
LONG ISLAND EXPWY
HORACE HARDIN
G EXPW
Y
LONG ISLAND
EXPWY
58 ST
36 ST
30 AV
GR
EEN
PO
INT
AV
20 AV
21 ST
JUNCTION BLVD
37 A
V NORTHERN BLVD
COLLEGE POINT BLVD
JEWEL A
V
UTOPIA PKW
Y
164 ST
GUY R. BREWER BLVD
PARSONS BLVD
KISSENA BLVD
MAIN ST
HILLSIDE AV
JAMAICA A
V
FRANCIS LEWIS BLVD
SUTPHIN BLVD
111 ST
LINDEN B
LVD
AUSTIN ST
CONDUIT AV
LEFFERTS BLVD
MERRICK BLVD
KENT AV
METROPOLITAN AV
METROPOLITAN AV
NASSAU AV
BEDFORD AV
MA
UR
ICE
AV
FLUSHING AV
69 ST
FOREST AV
WOODHAVEN BLVD
MYRTLE AV
JAC
KIE
RO
BIN
SO
N P
AR
KW
AY
WILSON AV
BUSHWICK AV
MYRTLE AV
BERGEN ST
BERGEN ST
BERGEN ST
HIC
KS
ST
CO
LU
MB
IA S
T
HE
NR
Y S
T
9 ST
UNION ST CHURCH A
V
PROSPECT AV
OCEAN PKWY
CONEY ISLAND AV
9 AV
FO
RT
HAM
ILTO
N PKW
Y
PARKSIDE A
V
WIN
THROP ST
NOSTRAND AV
AV Z
AV U
FLATBUSH AV
WASHINGTO
N
UTIC
A AV
UTIC
A AV
TH
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AV
86 ST
KIN
GS
HW
Y
FIF
TH
AV
39 ST
REMSEN AV
NEW YORK AV
NEW
YOR
K AV
AV M
FLA
TLA
ND
S A
V
AV H
OCEAN AV
BE
DFO
RD
AV
BEDFORD AV
VAN SICLEN AV
PENNSYLVANIA AV
POR
T WA
SHIN
GTO
N B
LVD
CR
OS
S B
AY
BLVD
CR
OS
S B
AY
BLV
D
PARSONS BLVD WHITESTONE EXPWY
FRANCIS LEWIS BLVD
MID
DLE
NE
CK
RD
NORTHERN BLVD
NORTHERN BLVD
CANAL ST
CANAL ST SPRING ST
T R A M W A Y
HOUSTON ST
3 AV
BOWERY W 4 ST
E 4 ST
BLEECKER ST
BLEECKER ST
23 ST
12 AV
23 ST
50 ST 50 ST
59 ST CENTRAL PARK SOUTH
79 ST
125 ST
UNIVERSITY HTS BR
UNION TURNPIK
E
CLEARVIEW EXPWY
163 ST
FR
ED
ER
ICK
D
OU
GL
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S B
LV
D
AD
AM
CL
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TO
NP
OW
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L B
LV
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VAN WYCK EXPW
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PITKIN AV
SEAGIRT BLVD
BE
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RO
CK
AW
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BE
AC
H B
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KIN
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HW
AY
82 ST 83 STV
ER
NO
N B
LV
D
BE
AC
H C
HA
NN
EL
DR
RO
CKAW
AY PT
BLV
D
HAMILTON BRIDGE
WASHINGTON BRIDGE
SpuytenDuyvil
Riverdale
UniversityHeights
MorrisHeights
Harlem125 St
MelroseYankees-E153 St
Tremont
Fordham
Botanical Garden
WilliamsBridge
Woodlawn
Wakefield
LongIslandCity
9 St
14 St
23 St
33 St
Christopher St
Hunterspoint Av
Woodside
Mets–Willets Point
Flushing
ForestHills
JamaicaKewGardens
Hollis
Auburndale Bayside Douglaston
Manhasset
Plandome
PortWashington
GreatNeck
LittleNeck
MurrayHill
Broadway
QueensVillage
Laurelton Rosedale
Woodmere
Cedar-hurst
Lawrence
Inwood
LocustManor
FarRockaway
East NY
Nostrand Av
MarbleHill
WTC
VANCORTLANDT
PARK
BRONXZOO
PELHAMBAY
PARK
ORCHARDBEACH
CENTRALPARK
WASHINGTONSQUARE PARK
METROPOLITANMUSEUMOF ART
RANDALLSISLAND
JAVITSCENTER
RIVERBANKSTATE PARK
UNITEDNATIONS
WTC Site
FLUSHINGMEADOWSCORONA
PARK
PROSPECTPARK
BROOKLYNBOTANICGARDEN
FORT GREENEPARK
GREEN-WOODCEMETERY
LAGUARDIAAIRPORT
JFKINTERNATIONAL
AIRPORT
JAMAICABAY
WILDLIFEREFUGE
GATEWAYNATIONAL
RECREATIONAREA–
JAMAICA BAY
EASTRIVERPARK
KISSENAPARK
CUNNINGHAMPARK
MARINEPARK
FLOYDBENNETT
FIELD
CALVARYCEMETERY
NEWCALVARY
CEMETERY
MT ZIONCEMETERY
MT OLIVETCEMETERY LUTHERAN
CEMETERY
JUNIPERVALLEY
PARKST JOHNS
CEMETERY
EVERGREENCEMETERY
FORESTPARK
RIVERSIDE PARK
HUDSON RIVER PARK
HIGHBRIDGEPARK
JACOBRIIS
PARK
LIBERTYISLAND
ELLISISLAND
NEW YORKTRANSIT MUSEUM
Q10 JFK Airport
Flushing–Main StSubway
Bus - N20 N21 Q12 Q13 Q15 Q15A Q16 Q17 Q19 Q20A/B Q25 Q26 Q27 Q28 Q34 Q44
Q48 LaGuardia Airport Q58 Q65 Q66 QBx1
LIRR
Jamaica–Sutphin BlvdLong Island Rail RoadSubway
Bus - Q6 Q8 Q9 Q20A/B Q24 Q25 Q30 Q31 Q34 Q40 Q41 Q43 Q44 Q54 Q56 Q60 Q65
AIRTRAIN JFK
Euclid Av/Pitkin AvSubway
Bus - B13 Q7 Q8
New Lots AvSubway
Bus - B6 B15 JFK Airport
CanarsieRockaway PkwySubway
Bus - B6 B17 B42 B60 B82
Flatbush Av/Brooklyn CollegeSubway
Bus - B6 B11 B41 B44 B103 Q35
Coney IslandStillwell AvSubway
Bus - B36 B68 B74 B82
Bay Pkwy/86 StSubway
Bus - B1 B6 B82
86 St/4 AvSubway
Bus - B1 B16 B63 B70S53 S79 S93
Marcy AvSubway
Bus - B24 B44 B46 B60 B62 Q54 Q59
Crown HeightsUtica AvSubway
Bus - B14 B17 B46
Rockaway BlvdSubway
Bus - Q7 Q11 Q21 Q41 Q53 Q112
Far RockawaySubway
Bus - N31 N32 N33 Q22 Q113
LIRR
Jamaica–169 St/179 StSubway (179 St only)
Bus - N1 N6 N22 N22A N24 N26 Q1 Q2 Q3 JFK AirportQ17 Q30 (169 St only)Q31 (169 St only)Q36 Q43 Q76 Q77 Q110 (179 St only, rush hour only)
Jamaica CenterSubway
Bus - N4 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q8 Q9 Q20A/B Q24 Q25 Q30 Q31 Q34 Q41 Q42 Q44 Q54 Q56 Q65 Q83 Q84 Q85 Q110 Q111 Q112 Q113
Pelham Bay ParkSubway
Bus - Bx5 Bx8 Bx12 Bx12 Select Bus Service Bx29 QBx1
Bee-Line45
Westchester SquareEast Tremont AvSubway
Bus - Bx4 Bx8 Bx21 Bx31 Bx40 Bx42
ParkchesterSubway
Bus - Bx4 Bx36 Bx39 Q44
Fordham PlazaMetro-North
Bus - Bx9 Bx12
Bx12 Select Bus Service
Bx15 Bx17 Bx22 Bx41 Bx55
Bee-Line60 61 62
Norwood–205 StSubway
Bus - Bx10 Bx16 Bx28 Bx30 Bx34
Wakefield–241 StSubway
Bus - Bx39 Bee-Line40 41 42 43
Metro-North Railroad WoodlawnSubway
Bus - Bx16 Bx34
Bee-Line4 20 21
Kings Hwy/E 16 StSubway
Bus - B2 B3K B7 B31 B82 B100
Sheepshead BaySubway
Bus - B4 B36 B49
Simpson StSubway
Bus - Bx4 Bx5 Bx11 Bx19 Bx27 Bx35
Van Cortlandt Pk–242 StSubway
Bus - Bx9
Bee-Line1 1C 1T 1W 2 3
Marble Hill–225 StSubway
Bus - Bx7 Bx9 Bx20
Metro-North Railroad
Inwood–207 StSubway
Bus - M100 Bx7 Bx12 Bx20
A only
George WashingtonBridge Bus Station175 St/181 StSubway
Bus - Bx3 Bx7 Bx11 Bx13 Bx35 Bx36 M4 M5 M98 M100 NJ Transit Red & Tan Lines
125 St/Metro-NorthSubway
Bus - Bx15 M35 M60 LaGuardia Airport M98 M100 M101 M103
34 Street-Herald SqSubway
Bus - M4 M5 M7 M16 M34 Q32PATH
City HallSubway
Bklyn Bridge–City HallSubway
Bus - M5 M9 M22 M103
4,5,6 only
Broadway–NassauFulton StreetSubway
Bus - M5 M9
Court St/Borough HallSubway
Jay St–Borough HallSubway
Bus - B25 B26 B38 B41 B45 B52 B54 B57 B61 B65 B67 B103
2,3 and northbound 4,5
Atlantic Av/Atlantic Av-Pacific StLong Island Rail RoadSubway
Bus - B41 B45 B63 B65 B67
Penn StationLong Island Rail Road Subway
Bus - M4 M7 M16 M20 M34 Q32NJ Transit • Amtrak • NY Airport Service
Port AuthorityBus TerminalSubwayBus - M11 M16 M20 M42 M104 Newark Airport Express •NY Airport Service •NJ Transit • other commuter & long-distance buses
except S
Times Sq–42 StSubway
Bus - M7 M20 M42 M104
Grand Central TerminalMetro-North RailroadSubway
Bus - M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M42 M101 M102 M103 Q32NY Airport ServiceNewark Airport Express
except S
3 Av–149 StSubway
Bus - Bx2 Bx4 Bx15 Bx19 Bx21 Bx41 Bx55
Hunts Point AvSubway
Bus - Bx5 Bx6 Bx19Jackson Heights74 St–Roosevelt AvSubway
Bus - Q32 Q33 LGA Airport
(except Marine Air Terminal)Q45 Q47 LGA Airport
(Marine Air Terminal only)Q49 Q53
Queens PlazaQueensboro PlazaSubway
Bus - B62 Q32Q39 Q60 Q66 Q67 Q69 Q100 Q101 Q102
E,M,R only
Myrtle–Wyckoff AvsSubway
Bus - B13 B26 B52 B54 Q55 Q58
Middle VillageMetropolitan AvSubway
Bus - Q38 Q54 Q67
Broadway JunctionSubway
Bus - B20 B25 B83 Q24 Q56LIRR
Woodhaven BlvdQueens CenterSubway
Bus - Q11 Q21 Q29 Q38Q53 Q59 Q60 Q88
Forest Hills 71 AvSubway
Bus - Q23 Q64LIRR
Kew Gardens Union TpkeSubway
Bus - Q10 JFK Airport Q37 Q60 Q46
southbound only
except
n-bound
6
Sexcept
BROOKLYN
MANHATTAN
QUEENS
THEBRONX
FINANCIALDISTRICT
BATTERY PARK CITY
CHINATOWN
LITTLE ITALYSOHO
TRIBECA
GREENWICHVILLAGE
CHELSEA
WESTSIDE
UPPEREASTSIDE
UPPERWESTSIDE
EASTHARLEM
HARLEM
WASHINGTONHEIGHTS
EASTVILLAGE
LOWEREAST SIDE
NOHO
RIVERDALE
KINGSBRIDGE
HIGH-BRIDGE
FORDHAM
TREMONT
MORRISANIA
THE HUB
HUNTS POINT
RIKERSISLAND
MOTT HAVEN
SOUNDVIEW
PARKCHESTER
CITYISLAND
BAYCHESTER
CO-OPCITY
EASTCHESTER
ASTORIA
LONGISLAND
CITY
ROOSEVELTISLAND
JACKSONHEIGHTS
CORONA
FLUSHING
HILLCREST
FRESHMEADOWS
JAMAICAESTATES
JAMAICA
HOLLIS
QUEENSVILLAGE
KEWGARDENS
KEWGARDENS
HILLS
RICHMONDHILL
FORESTHILLS
REGO PARK
MIDDLEVILLAGE
GLENDALEWOODHAVEN
OZONEPARK
HOWARD BEACHEASTNEWYORK
OCEAN HILL-BROWNSVILLE
CANARSIE
EASTFLATBUSH
MIDWOOD
BENSONHURST
FLATBUSH
PARKSLOPE
REDHOOK
GOVERNORSISLAND
CARROLLGARDENS
FLATLANDS
ROCKAWAYPARK
BREEZYPOINT
SHEEPSHEADBAY
BRIGHTONBEACH
CONEY ISLAND
BAY RIDGE
BOROUGHPARK
SUNSETPARK
BROOKLYNHEIGHTS
WILLIAMSBURG
FORT GREENE
GREENPOINT
BEDFORD-STUYVESANT
CROWNHEIGHTS
BUSHWICK
RIDGEWOOD
MASPETH
DUMBO
NAVYYARD
MTA
Sta
ten
Isla
nd R
ailw
ay
Grasmere
St. George
Tompkinsville
Stapleton
Clifton S51
Old Town
Dongan Hills
Jefferson AvGrant City
S51/81
New Dorp
Oakwood Heights S57
Bay Terrace
Great KillsS54 X7 X8
Eltingville
Annadale S55
Huguenot S55 X17 X19
Prince's Bay S56
Pleasant Plains
Richmond ValleyNassauS74/84
AtlanticS74/84
Tottenville S74/84
RICHMOND TERRACE
VICTORY BLVD
VA
ND
ER
BIL
T A
V
ARTHUR KILL RD
STATEN ISLAND EXPRESSWAY VERRAZANO-NARROWS BRIDGE
FOREST AV
HY
LA
N B
LVD
HYLAN BLVD
AR
TH
UR
KIL
L RD
WE
ST
SH
OR
E E
XP
WY
RIC
HM
ON
D A
V
SILVERLAKEPARK
SNUG HARBORCULTURAL CENTER
COLLEGE OFSTATEN ISLAND
SEAVIEW
HOSPITALSTATENISLANDMALL
NEWSPRINGVILLE
PARK
LA TOURETTEPARK
GREATKILLSPARK
CLOVELAKESPARK
Staten Island MallBus - S44/94 S55 S56 S59 S61/91 S79 S89 X17 X31
Eltingville Staten Island Railway Bus - S59 S79 S89 X1 X4 X5
New Dorp Staten Island Railway Bus - S57 S76/86
Grasmere Staten Island Railway Bus - S53
Port RichmondBus - S40/S90 S53 S57 S59 S66
St. George Staten Island Railway Bus - S40/90 S42 S44/94 S46/96 S48/98 S51/81 S52 S61/91 S62/92 S66 S74/84 S76/86 S78Staten Island Ferry
STATENISLAND
PORTRICHMOND
WEST NEWBRIGHTON
MARINERSHARBOR
FOXHILLS ROSEBANK
CASTLETONCORNERS
BULLSHEAD
CHELSEA
WESTERLEIGH
TODTHILL
NEWDORPBEACH
WOODROWROSSVILLE
CHARLESTON
ARDENHEIGHTS
FRESHKILLS
RICHMONDTOWN
TOTTENVILLEBEACH
The subway operates 24 hours a day, but not all lines operate at all times. The map depicts morning to evening weekday service. For more information, call our Travel Information Center (6AM to 10PM)at 718-330-1234. Non-English- speaking customers call 718-330-4847 (6AM to 10PM).
To show service more clearly, geography on this map has been modified. © 2010 Metropolitan Transportation Authority
visit www.mta.info
The subway map depicts weekday service. Service differs by time of day and is sometimes affected by construction. Overhead directional signs on platforms show weekend, evening, and late night service.
This information is also available on mta.info: click on “Maps” in the top menu bar, then select “Individual Subway Line Maps.”
For construction-related service changes, click on “Planned Service Changes” in the top menu bar. This information is also at station entrances and on platform columns of affected lines.
Key
June 2010
Full time servicePart time service
All trains stop (local and express service)
Local service onlyRush hour line
extension
Free subway transfer
Free out-of-system subway transfer (excluding single-ride ticket)
Terminal
Bus or AIRTRAINto airport
Accessiblestation
Additional expressservice
Normal service
Commuter rail service
Bus to airport
StationName
A•C
MTA New York City Subwaywith bus and railroad connections
Police
M60
Reference: New York Subway Map. http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/submap.htm [Accessed 05/12/10].
6
Paris
Funiculaire deMontmartre
Parcde Bercy
IvryPont Mandela
Tarification spéciale
RER: au delà de cette limite,en direction de la banlieue,la tarification dépend de la distance. Les tickets t+ ne sont pas valables.
Légende
Pôle d’échange multimodal,métro, RER, tramway
Correspondances
Fin de lignesen correspondance
Navette fluviale
Meudonsur-Seine
Parcde St-Cloud
Les Coteaux
Les Milons
SuresnesLongchamp
Belvédère
Puteaux
Muséede Sèvres
Brimborion
LesMoulineaux
Hôtel de Villede La Courneuve
HôpitalDelafontaine Cosmonautes
La Courneuve6 Routes
Cimetièrede St-Denis
Marchéde St-Denis
Basilique deSt-Denis
ThéâtreGérard Philipe
Hôtel de Villede Bobigny
La Ferme
Libération
Escadrille Normandie–Niémen
Auguste Delaune
Pontde Bondy
PetitNoisy
Jean Rostand
Gaston Roulaud
Hôpital Avicenne
La Courneuve–8 Mai 1945
Maurice Lachâtre
Danton
Stade Géo André
Drancy–Avenir
Jacques-HenriLartigue
Poternedes Peupliers
StadeCharléty
Montsouris
JeanMoulin
DidotBrancion
Desnouettes
GeorgesBrassens
HenriFarman
SuzanneLenglen
Ported’Issy
ColonelFabien
Stade de FranceSaint-Denis
Saint-DenisPorte de Paris
Basiliquede St-Denis
Portede Saint-Ouen
LamarckCaulaincourt
JulesJoffrin
Saint-Denis
GuyMôquet
Porte de Clichy
ChâteletLes Halles
Stalingrad
MarcadetPoissonniers
Hôtel de Ville
Arts etMétiers
ChâteauRouge
StrasbourgSaint-Denis
Saint-Mandé
Maisons-AlfortAlfortville
Hoche
MarxDormoy
La CourneuveAubervilliers
Le Bourget
Jaurès
Placedes FêtesBelleville
Jourdain Télégraphe
Ourcq Portede Pantin
JacquesBonsergent Saint-Fargeau
Pelleport
Portede Bagnolet
Danube
BotzarisButtes
Chaumont
République
Parmentier
SèvresBabylone
RichelieuDrouot
Palais RoyalMusée du
Louvre
RéaumurSébastopol
Raspail
Pyramides
MontparnasseBienvenüe
Mabillon
ClunyLa Sorbonne
MalakoffRue Étienne Dolet
Chausséed’Antin
La Fayette
BonneNouvelle
GrandsBoulevards
Bourse Sentier
BarbèsRochechouart La Chapelle
Pigalle
Poissonnière
Liège
Notre-Damede-Lorette
Saint-Georges
Abbesses
Anvers
La Fourche
Placede Clichy
Pereire–Levallois Blanche
Villiers
Opéra
Auber
HavreCaumartin
Trinitéd’Estienne
d’Orves
FranklinD. Roosevelt
Neuilly–Porte Maillot
Avenue Foch
Bir-Hakeim
Invalides
Pasteur
Pontde l’Alma
JavelAndréCitroën
Javel
MichelAnge
Molitor
La Muette
MichelAnge
Auteuil
BoulainvilliersChamp de MarsTour Eiffel
ChampsÉlysées
Clemenceau
TrocadéroAvenue
Henri Martin
Avenuedu Pdt Kennedy
Commerce
Félix Faure
Ruede la Pompe Iéna
Ranelagh
Jasmin
Exelmans
ChardonLagache
Églised’Auteuil
Duroc
La MottePicquetGrenelle
Assemblée Nationale
Varenne
St-MichelNotre-DameSolférino
Musée d’Orsay
Concorde Les Halles
Jussieu
Odéon
ÉtienneMarcel
Vavin
SaintGermaindes-Prés
Saint-Sulpice
St-Placide
PlaceMonge
Pont NeufTuileries
Notre-Damedes-Champs
Luxembourg
Port-Royal
LouvreRivoli
St-Michel
Bastille
Daumesnil
Reuilly–Diderot
PèreLachaise
Oberkampf
Quai dela Rapée
SaintMarcel Bercy
Fillesdu Calvaire
Chemin Vert
St-SébastienFroissart
Ruedes Boulets
Charonne
SèvresLecourbe
Cambronne
Pont Marie
SullyMorland
PhilippeAuguste
AlexandreDumas
Avron
Voltaire
Quatre Septembre
Saint-Ambroise
RueSaint-Maur
Porte deVincennes
Vincennes
Maraîchers
Porte de Montreuil
Robespierre
Croix de Chavaux
Buzenval
Pyrénées
Laumière
Châteaud’Eau
Porte Dorée
Porte de Charenton
Ivrysur-Seine
Portede Choisy
Ported’Italie Porte
d’Ivry
Créteil–Université
Créteil–L’Échat
Maisons-AlfortLes Juilliottes
Maisons-Alfort–Stade
DenfertRochereau
MaisonBlanche
CensierDaubenton
Tolbiac
Le KremlinBicêtre
VillejuifLéo Lagrange
VillejuifPaul Vaillant-Couturier
Glacière
Corvisart
Nationale
Chevaleret
CitéUniversitaire
Gentilly
OrlyOuestAntony
MalakoffPlateau de Vanves
MoutonDuvernet
Gaîté
EdgarQuinet
Bd Victor
Issy
Meudon–Val-Fleury
Chaville–Vélizy
Portede St-Cloud
Pantin
Magenta
LaplaceVitrysur-Seine
Les Ardoines
Le Vertde Maisons
Saint-Ouen
Les Agnettes
Gabriel Péri
Les Grésillons
Ledru-Rollin
Ménilmontant
Couronnes
Montgallet
Michel Bizot
Charenton–Écoles
Liberté
FaidherbeChaligny
École Vétérinairede Maisons-Alfort
École Vétérinairede Maisons-Alfort
Gared’Austerlitz
St-Paul
MaubertMutualité
CardinalLemoine
Temple
ChâteauLandon
Bolivar
Église de Pantin
Bobigny–PantinRaymond Queneau
Riquet
Crimée
Corentin Cariou
Porte de la Villette
Aubervilliers–PantinQuatre Chemins
Fortd’Aubervilliers
LesGobelins
CampoFormio
Quaide la Gare
CourSt-Émilion
Pierre et MarieCurie
Dugommier
Bel-Air
Picpus
Saint-Jacques
Dupleix
Passy
Alésia
Pernety
Plaisance
Porte de Vanves
Convention
Vaugirard
Porte de Versailles
Corentin Celton
Volontaires
Falguière
Lourmel
Boucicaut
Ségur
Ruedu Bac
Rennes
SaintFrançoisXavier
Vaneau
ÉcoleMilitaire
La TourMaubourg
AvenueÉmile Zola
CharlesMichels
MirabeauPorte
d’AuteuilBoulogne
Jean Jaurès
Billancourt
Marcel Sembat
Cité
AlmaMarceau
Boissière
KléberGeorge V
Argentine
Victor Hugo
Les Sablons
Porte Maillot
Pont de Neuilly
Esplanadede La Défense
Saint-Philippedu-Roule
Miromesnil
Saint-Augustin
Courcelles
Ternes
Monceau
RomeMalesherbes
Wagram
Porte de Champerret
Anatole FranceLouise Michel
Europe
Le Peletier
Cadet
Pereire
Brochant
Mairiede Clichy
Garibaldi
Mairie de Saint-Ouen
CarrefourPleyel
Simplon
Bérault
RichardLenoir
Goncourt
BréguetSabin
Rambuteau
La PlaineStade de France
Arcueil–Cachan
Bourg-la-Reine
Bagneux
Madeleine
BibliothèqueFr. Mitterrand
BibliothèqueFr. Mitterrand
IssyVal de Seine
Orly
Portede Clignancourt
Garede Saint-Denis
Orry-la-Ville–Coye
Garede l’Est
Garede Lyon
Saint-Denis–Université
Portede la Chapelle
La Courneuve8 Mai 1945
AéroportCharles de Gaulle
Mitry–Claye
BobignyPablo Picasso
PréSt-Gervais Mairie des Lilas
Mairiede Montreuil
Gallieni
LouisBlanc
Porte des Lilas
Gambetta
Gare du Nord
Charlesde Gaulle
Étoile
Pont de LevalloisBécon
PorteDauphine
St-Germainen-Laye La Défense
BoulognePont de St-Cloud
Châtelet
Gared’Austerlitz
Nation
Châteaude Vincennes
Créteil–Préfecture
Olympiades
Mairie d’Ivry
Malesherbes Melun
Massy–PalaiseauVersailles–ChantiersRobinson
DourdanSaint-Martin-d’Étampes
Saint-Rémylès-Chevreuse
Placed’Italie
Villejuif–Louis Aragon
OrlySud
Mairie d’Issy
Châtillon–Montrouge
Pontde Sèvres
Gare Saint-Lazare
GareMontparnasse
ChellesGournay
Noisy-le-Sec
HaussmannSaint-Lazare
Asnières–GennevilliersLes Courtilles
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Ported’Orléans
Balard
Versailles–Rive Gauche
Marne-la-Vallée
Boissy-Saint-Léger
Pontoise
Poissy
Cergy
Saint-Lazare
Tournan
Pontdu Garigliano
Parcs Disneyland
Parc des Expositions
CDG
Château de Versailles
Grande Arche
Paris
32 46 • wap.ratp.frwww.ratp.fr
Prop
riété
de
la R
ATP
- Age
nce
Cart
ogra
phiq
ue -
PM1
07-2
009
- CC
- Des
ign:
bdc
cons
eil -
Rep
rodu
ctio
n in
terd
ite
Metro Maps
Reference: Paris Metro Map. http://www.ratp.fr/informer/pdf/orienter/f_plan.php?fm=pdf&loc=reseaux&nompdf=metro [Accessed 04/12/10].
7
Elective A Supporting Material
Tokyo
Reference: Tokyo Subway map. http://www1.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/index.html [Accessed 15/11/10].
8
Metro Maps
Berlin S & U-Bahn Map
The U-Bahn consists of ten lines. The pre-war U-Bahn line designations consisted of letters, with added Roman numerals in case of line branchings. This system continued to be used into the 1960s on both sides.
After the erection of the wall, East Berlin was left with line E and the eastern half of line A. This oddity and the fact that the two line network was simple to navigate anyway, caused line designations to be gradually abandoned there over the years.
West Berlin abandoned the letter based system in 1966 and replaced it by line numbers 1 through 9, the system still in place today. The shortest line in this system was line 5 which consisted of two stops only (Deutsche Oper - Richard-Wagner-Platz). It was closed in 1970, to be replaced by an extension of line 7 which opened a few years later. This move freed line number 5. West Berlin BVG then decided to reserve this line number for East Berlin’s line E in case of reunification - the only line that ran exclusively in East Berlin territory and was therefore not yet covered in the new West Berlin system.
In 1984, BVG became the operator of the West Berlin S-Bahn which until then had been operated by East Germany’s Deutsche Reichsbahn. It incorporated the S-Bahn into its line numbering system by using the method of West German transport systems of giving new line numbers prefixed by “S” to the S-Bahn, and adding the prefix “U” to the existing U-Bahn lines. So “line 1” became “U1” etc.
After Berlin’s reunification in 1990, East Berlin’s line E was renumbered U5, as had been planned. At
the same time, the eastern half of line A became U2 like its western counterpart, even though at the time they were not yet connected. When U2 was actually rejoined in 1993, the western branches of U1 and U2 were swapped, and the U3 disappeared from the map. What had been U3—a short shuttle line between Uhlandstraße and Wittenbergplatz—became part of the new U15, a line that in theory continued past Wittenbergplatz in parallel with U1, to Schlesisches Tor (and, when it was reopened in 1995, Warschauer Straße); in practice, particularly during off-peak hours, U15 was often operated as a shuttle identical to the old U3. In 2004, the full length of U15 was redesignated U1, and a new U3 was created from what had been the U1 west of Nollendorfplatz to Krumme Lanke. (This was the same route as the U2 until 1993, extended one station further east to Nollendorfplatz to enable trains to be reversed and to allow one-stop transfer to the U4).
System map of the U-Bahn in 2004
9
Elective A Supporting Material
Berlin U-Bahn Lines
Line Route Opened Length Stations
Uhlandstraße – Warschauer Straße 1902–1926 8.814 km (5.477 mi) 13
Pankow – Ruhleben 1902–2000 20.716 km (12.872 mi) 29
Nollendorfplatz – Krumme Lanke 1913–1929 11.940 km (7.419 mi) 15
Nollendorfplatz – Innsbrucker Platz 1910 2.864 km (1.780 mi) 5
Alexanderplatz – Hönow 1930–1989 18.356 km (11.406 mi) 20
Berlin Hauptbahnhof – Brandenburger Tor 2009 1.470 km (0.913 mi)[4] 3
Alt-Tegel – Alt-Mariendorf 1923–1966 19.888 km (12.358 mi) 29
Rathaus Spandau – Rudow 1924–1984 31.760 km (19.735 mi) 40
Wittenau – Hermannstraße 1927–1996 18.042 km (11.211 mi) 24
Rathaus Steglitz – Osloer Straße 1961–1976 12.523 km (7.781 mi) 18
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn [Accessed 20/12/10].
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Metro Maps
Berlin S- & U-Bahn Map
The Berlin S-Bahn is a rapid transit system in and around Berlin, the capital city of Germany. It consists of 15 lines and is integrated with the mostly underground U-Bahn to form the backbone of Berlin’s rapid transport system. Unlike the U-Bahn, the S-Bahn crosses the Berlin city and state border into the surrounding state of Brandenburg, mostly from the former East Berlin but today also from West Berlin to Potsdam.
Although the S- and U-Bahn are part of a unified fare system, they have different operators. The S-Bahn is operated by S-Bahn Berlin GmbH, a subsidiary of the Deutsche Bahn, whilst the U-Bahn is run by BVG, the main public transit company for the city of Berlin.
RoutesThe S-Bahn routes all feed into one of three core lines: a central, elevated east-west line (the Stadtbahn), a central, mostly underground north-south line (the Nord-Süd-Tunnel), and a circular, elevated line (the Ringbahn). Geographically, the Ringbahn takes the form of a dog’s head and is colloquially known to Berliners by that name (Hundekopf). Outside the Ringbahn, suburban routes radiate out in all directions.
Generally speaking, the first digit of a route number designates the main route or a group of routes. Thus, S25 is a bifurcation of S2, while S41, S42, S45, S46, and S47 are all Ringbahn routes that share some of the same lines. Stations in brackets are serviced at certain times only (Monday-Friday during off peak in the case of S47 and during peak in the case of S8 and S85). S45 and S85 only run Mon-Fri.
Also, not every train reaches the nominal terminus of a line. For example, every other train on S1 runs only to Frohnau, five stops before Oranienburg, and the last stop on S3 towards Erkner which is reached by every train is Friedrichshagen. Similarly, some of the S2 trains terminate northwards only at Gesundbrunnen, and most of S5 trains run only to Strausberg or even Mahlsdorf, rendering Strausberg Nord the least frequented stop on the whole network.
The Berlin S-Bahn Network
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Berlin S-Bahn Lines
Line Terminus Route Terminus
Wannsee Nord-Süd-Tunnel Oranienburg
Blankenfelde Nord-Süd-Tunnel Bernau
Teltow Stadt Nord-Süd-Tunnel Hennigsdorf
Erkner Stadtbahn Spandau
Südkreuz Ringbahn Südkreuz (clockwise)
Südkreuz Ringbahn Südkreuz (counter-clockwise)
Berlin-Schönefeld Ringbahn Südkreuz (Bundesplatz)
Königs Wusterhausen Ringbahn Westend
Spindlersfeld Ringbahn Hermannstraße ( Südkreuz)
Strausberg Nord Stadtbahn Westkreuz
Ahrensfelde Stadtbahn Potsdam Hauptbahnhof
Wartenberg Stadtbahn Spandau
(Zeuthen) Grünau Ringbahn Hohen Neuendorf
(Grünau) Schöneweide Ringbahn Waidmannslust
Berlin-Schönefeld Ringbahn Blankenburg
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn [Accessed 20/12/10].
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Historical Maps
Berlin S- & U-Bahn
1933
1960
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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1968
1988
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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Metro Maps
London Tube Map
The tube map is the schematic diagram (transit map) representing the lines and stations of some of London’s rapid transit rail systems, the London Underground (commonly known as the tube, hence the name), the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and London Overground.
As a schematic diagram it shows not the geographic but the relative positions of stations along the lines, stations’ connective relations with each other and their fare zone locations. The basic design concepts have been widely adopted for other network maps around the world, especially that of mapping topologically rather than geographically.
Early MapsWhat is now a single network of lines controlled by a single organisation began as a collection of independent underground railway companies that constructed lines in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These companies published route maps of their own services but did not, generally, co-operate in advertising their services collectively. Early maps were based on standard geographic city maps indicating the directions of lines and locations of stations, overlaid on geographic features and main roads.
The first combined map was published in 1908 by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) in conjunction with four other underground railway companies using the “Underground” brand as part of a common advertising initiative. The map showed eight lines – four operated by the UERL and one from each of the other four companies:
UERL lines
• Bakerloo Railway - brown• Hampstead Railway - grey• Piccadilly Railway - yellow• District Railway - green
Other lines
• Central London Railway - blue• City and South London Railway - black• Great Northern and City Railway - orange• Metropolitan Railway - red
The use of a geographic base map presented restrictions in this early map; to enable sufficient clarity of detail in the crowded central area of the map, the extremities of District and Metropolitan lines were omitted so a full network diagram was not provided.
The route map continued to be developed and was issued in various formats and artistic styles until 1920, when, for the first time, the geographic background detail was omitted in a map designed by MacDonald Gill. This freed the design to enable greater flexibility in the positioning of lines and stations. The routes became more stylised but the arrangement remained, largely, geographic in nature. The 1932 edition was the last geographic map to be published, before the diagrammatic map was introduced.
Beck’s MapsThe first diagrammatic map of the Underground was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Beck was an Underground employee who realised that because the railway ran mostly underground, the physical
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locations of the stations were irrelevant to the traveller wanting to know how to get to one station from another — only the topology of the railway mattered. This approach is similar to that of electrical circuit diagrams; while these were not the inspiration for Beck’s diagram, his colleagues pointed out the similarities and he once produced a joke map with the stations replaced by electrical-circuit symbols and names with terminology, such as “bakelite” for “Bakerloo” In fact, Beck based his diagram on a similar mapping system for underground sewage systems.
To this end, he devised a simplified map, consisting of stations, straight line segments connecting them, and the River Thames; lines ran only vertically, horizontally, or on 45 degree diagonals. To make the map clearer and to emphasise connections, Beck differentiated between ordinary stations (marked with tick marks) and interchanges (marked with diamonds). The Underground was initially sceptical of his proposal — it was an uncommissioned spare-time project, and it was tentatively introduced to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933. It immediately became popular, and the Underground has used topological maps to illustrate the network ever since.
Despite the complexity of making the map, Beck was paid just five guineas for the work. After its initial success, he continued to design the Underground map until 1960, a single (and unpopular) 1939 edition by Hans Scheger being the exception. During this time, as well as accommodating new lines and stations, Beck continually altered the design, for example changing the interchange symbol from a diamond to a circle, as well as altering the line colours - the Central Line from orange to red, and the Bakerloo Line from red to brown. Beck’s final design, in 1960, bears a strong resemblance to modern-day maps. Beck lived in Finchley, and one of his maps is still preserved on the southbound platform at Finchley Central station on the Northern Line.
After BeckBy 1960, Beck had fallen out with the Underground’s publicity officer, Harold Hutchinson. Hutchinson,
though not a designer himself, drafted his own version of the Tube map in 1960. It removed the smoothed corners of Beck’s design and created some highly cramped areas (most notably, around Liverpool Street station); in addition, lines were generally less straight. However, Hutchinson also introduced interchange symbols (circles for Underground-only, squares for interchanges with British Rail) that were black and allowed multiple lines through them, as opposed to Beck who used one circle for each line at an interchange, coloured according to the corresponding line.
In 1964, the design of the map was taken over by Paul Garbutt, who, like Beck, had produced a map in his spare time due to his dislike of the Hutchinson design. Garbutt’s map restored curves and bends to the diagram, but retained Hutchinson’s black interchange circles (the squares however were replaced with circles with a dot inside). Garbutt continued to produce Underground maps for at least another 20 years — Tube maps stopped bearing the designer’s name in 1986, by which time the elements of the map bore a very strong resemblance to today’s map. Today, the map bears the legend “This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck” in the lower right-hand corner.
While the standard Tube map mostly avoided representing main-line rail services, a new variant of the map issued in 1973, the “London’s Railways” map, was the first to depict Tube and surface rail services in a diagrammatic style closely matched to Beck’s designs. It was designed by Tim Demuth of the LT publicity office and was jointly sponsored by British Rail and London Transport. This map did not replace the standard Tube map, but continued to be published as a supplementary resource, later known as the “London Connections” map.
Alterations have been made to the map over the years. Recent designs have incorporated changes to the network, such as the Docklands Light Railway and the Jubilee Line Extension. The map also includes major rail lines used for journeys within London, such as London Overground. It also shows
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tube stops with access to national rail stations, rail links to airports, and river boats. Stations that can be walked between are now shown, often with the distance between them (this is an evolution of the pedestrian route between Bank and Monument stations, which was once prominently marked on the map). Further, step-free access notations are also incorporated in the map.
In addition, since 2002 the Underground ticket zones have been added, to better help passengers judge the cost of a journey. Nevertheless the map remains true to Beck’s original scheme, and many other transport systems use schematic maps to represent their services, undoubtedly inspired by Beck. A facsimile of Beck’s original design is on display on the southbound platform at his local station, Finchley Central. The map is currently maintained and updated by Alan Foale, of The LS Company.
Despite there having been many versions over the years, somehow the perception of many users is that the current map actually is, more or less, the 1930 Beck version. This is a remarkable testament to the effectiveness of the original design. Beck did actually draw versions with other formats, 22 1/2 degrees rather than 45 (the Paris Métro version uses 22 1/2 degrees as a base); and an unused version for the 1948 London Olympics.
One of the major changes to be made to the revision of the tube map put out in September 2009 was the removal of the River Thames. Although historically the river was not present on several official maps (for example according to David Leboff & Tim Demuth’s book; in 1907, 1908, and 1919), from 1921 it was absent for several years (on pocket maps designed by MacDonald Gill). The Thames-free 2009 version was the first time that the river has not appeared on the tube map since the Stringemore pocket map of 1926. This latest removal resulted in widespread international media attention,and general disapproval from most Londoners as well as from Mayor Boris Johnson. Based on this reaction, the following edition of the diagram in December 2009 reinstated both the river and fare zones.
TypefaceThe font for the map, including station names, is Johnston, which has perfect circles for the letter “O”.
Station MarksAn important symbol that Beck introduced was the ‘tick’ to indicate stations. This allowed stations to be placed closer together while preserving clarity, because the tick was only on the side of the line nearer the station name (ideally centrally placed, though the arrangement of lines did not always allow this).
From the start, interchange stations were given a special mark to indicate their importance, though its shape changed over the years. In addition, from 1960, marks were used to identify stations that offered convenient interchange with British Railways (now National Rail). The following shapes have been used:
• Empty circle (one for each line or station, where convenient) - standard default mark
• Empty circle (one for each station) - 1938 experimental map
• Empty diamond (one for each line) - early 1930s• Empty square - interchange with British Railways,
1960–1964• Circle with dot inside - interchange with British
Rail, 1964–1970
Since 1970 the map has used the British Rail ‘double arrow’ beside the station name to indicate main-line interchanges. Where the mainline station has a different name from the Underground station that it connects with, since 1977 this has been shown in a box. The distance between the tube station and the mainline station is now shown.
In recent years, some maps have marked stations offering step-free access suitable for wheelchair users with a blue circle containing a wheelchair symbol in white.
Tube stations with links to airports (Heathrow Terminals 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for London Heathrow
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Airport, and London City Airport DLR station) are shown with a black aeroplane symbol, and stations with a National Rail link to airports are shown with a red aeroplane symbol.
Since 2000, stations with a nearby interchange to river bus piers on the Thames have been marked with a small boat symbol, to promote TfL’s newly-formed London River Services.
While Eurostar services used Waterloo International, the Eurostar logo was shown next to London Waterloo station. On 14 November 2007, these services were transferred to St. Pancras International, and Kings Cross St. Pancras tube station now bears the text “for St. Pancras International”, although it does not show the Eurostar logo.
Some interchanges are more convenient than others and the map designers have repeatedly rearranged the layout of the map to try to indicate where the interchanges are more awkward, such as by making the interchange circles further apart and linking them with thin black lines. Sometimes the need for simplicity overrides this goal: the Bakerloo/Northern Lines interchange at Charing Cross is not very convenient and passengers are better off changing at Embankment, but the need to simplify the inner London area means that the map seems to indicate that Charing Cross is the easier interchange.
Lines or servicesThe map aims to make the complicated network of services easy to understand, but there are occasions when it might be useful to have more information about the services that operate on each line.
The District Line is the classic example; it is shown as one line on the map, but comprises services on the main route between Upminster and Ealing/Richmond/Wimbledon; between Edgware Road and Wimbledon; and the High Street Kensington to Kensington Olympia shuttle service. For most of its history the map has not distinguished these services, which could be misleading to an unfamiliar user.
Recent maps have tried to tackle this problem by separating the different routes at Earl’s Court.
Limited-service routes have sometimes been identified with hatched lines, with some complications added to the map to show where peak-only services run through to branches, such as that to Chesham on the Metropolitan Line. The number of routes with a limited service has declined in recent years as patronage recovered from its early 1980s low point. As there are now fewer restrictions to show, the remaining ones are now mainly indicated in the accompanying text rather than by special line markings.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map [Accessed 20/12/10].
Geographically Accurate Tube Map
18 Bakerloo Line
Central Line
Circle Line
District Line
Hammersmith & City Line
Jubilee Line
Metropolitan Line
Northern Line
Piccadilly Line
Victoria Line
Waterloo & City Line
DLR
Overground
London Underground Lines
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Reference: GARLAND, K., 1994. Mr Beck’s underground map. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing. pp.16.
Henry Beck’s Original Sketch for the Tube Map (1931)
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Historical Maps
London Underground
1911
1920
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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1933
1949
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.Reference: GARLAND, K., 1994. Mr Beck’s underground map. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing. pp.16.
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History of Music, The Guardian 2006
The Great Bear – Simon Patterson 1992
Reference: Greater Shakespeare. http://mangashakespeare.ning.com/profiles/blogs/753772:BlogPost:5831 [Accessed 21/12/10].Reference: Guardian Tube Map. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/02/03/post_51.html [Accessed 21/12/10].
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Greater Shakespeare – Royal Shakespeare Company 2007
World Metro Map 2003
Reference: World Metro Map. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map [Accessed 21/12/10].Reference: The Great Bear. https://rickoshea.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/blogging-underground/ [Accessed 21/12/10].
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Metro Maps
Moscow Metro Map
The Moscow Metro (Russian: Московский метрополитен, Moskovsky Metropoliten) is a rapid transit system that serves Moscow, Russia as well as a neighbouring town of Krasnogorsk.
Opened in 1935 with one 11 kilometres (6.8 mi) line and 13 stations, it was the first underground railway system in the Soviet Union. Currently, Moscow Metro has 182 stations. Its route length is 301.2 kilometres (187.2 mi). The system is mostly underground, with the deepest section located at 84 metres (276 ft) below ground, at Park Pobedy station.
The Moscow Metro is the world’s second most heavily used rapid transit system after Tokyo’s twin subway. It is a state-owned enterprise.
The Moscow Metro has 301.2 km (187.2 mi) of route length, 12 lines, and 182 stations. The average daily passenger traffic during the year is 6.6 million pas-sengers per day. The highest passenger traffic is highest on weekdays, when the Metro carries over 7 million passengers per day. The traffic is lower on weekends.
Each metro line is identified by an alphanumeric index (usually consisting of just a number), a name, and a colour. The voice announcements refer to the lines by name. A male voice announces the next station when going towards the centre, and a female voice when going away from it. On the circle line, the clockwise direction has male voice announcements for the stations, while the counter-clockwise direction has female voice announcements. The lines are also as-signed unique colours in the maps and signs. Naming by colour is frequent in colloquial usage, except for
the very similar shades of green assigned to Ka-khovskaya Line (number 11), Zamoskvoretskaya Line (number 2), Lyblinsko-Dmitrovskaya Line (number 10) and Butovskaya Line (number L1).
The system operates according to an enhanced spoke-hub distribution paradigm, with the majority of rail lines running radially from the centrally located downtown Moscow to the peripheral districts. The Koltsevaya Line (number 5) forms a 20 kilometres (12 mi) long ring that enables passenger travel between these spokes.
The signs showing the stations that can be reached in a given direction are installed on the stations.
The majority of stations and rail lines are under-ground. Some lines have ground and above-ground sections. Filyovskaya Line is notable for its being the only line with most of the tracks situated on the ground.
The Moscow Metro is open from about 05:30 until 01:00. The precise opening time varies at different stations according to the arrival of the first train, but all stations close for entrance simultaneously at 01:00. The reason for closing down overnight is the need for regular maintenance.
The minimum interval between the trains of 90 seconds can be observed during the morning and evening rush hours.
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Moscow Metro Lines
Index & Colour
English Transliteration Russian Name First Opened
Latest Extension
Length Stations
Sokolnicheskaya Сокольническая 1935 1990 26.1 km 19
Zamoskvoretskaya Замоскворецкая 1938 1985 36.9 km 20
Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Арбатско-Покровская 1938 2009 43.5 km 21
Filyovskaya Филёвская 1958 2006 14.9 km 13
Koltsevaya Кольцевая 1950 1954 19.3 km 12
Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya Калужско-Рижская 1958 1990 37.6 km 24
Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya
Таганско-Краснопресненская
1966 1975 35.9 km 19
Kalininskaya Калининская 1979 1986 13.1 km 7
Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya
Серпуховско-Тимирязевская
1983 2002 41.2 km 25
Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya Люблинско-Дмитровская
1995 2010 23.7 km 14
Kakhovskaya Каховская 1995 3.3 km 3
Butovskaya Бутовская 2003 5.5 km 5
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro [Accessed 20/12/10].
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Historical Maps
Moscow Metro
1958
1967
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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1980
1983
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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Metro Maps
New York Subway Map
The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system owned by the City of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority, a subsidiary agency of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and also known as MTA New York City Transit. It is one of the oldest and most extensive public transportation systems in the world, with 468 stations in operation (423 if stations connected by transfers are counted as a single station); 209 mi (337 km) of routes, translating into 656 miles (1,056 km) of revenue track; and a total of 842 miles (1,355 km) including non-revenue trackage. In 2009, the subway delivered over 1.579 billion rides, averaging over five million (5,086,833 rides) on weekdays, 2.9 million on Saturdays, and 2.2 million on Sundays.
The New York City Subway is the fourth busiest rapid transit rail system in the world in annual ridership, after Tokyo’s, Moscow’s, and Seoul’s rapid transit systems. It is one of the four systems in the US, along with portions of the Chicago ‘L’ system, PATH, and PATCO to offer service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Contrary to its name, the New York City Subway system is not all underground. In fact, across the city’s boroughs, there are dozens of miles of track, and there are many stations that are elevated or at grade level. The system’s stations are located throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. (The borough of Staten Island has a rail line, but it is not considered part of the New York City subway system). All services pass through Manhattan, except for the Franklin Avenue Shuttle in Brooklyn, the Rockaway Park Shuttle in Queens, and the Brooklyn–Queens Crosstown Local
(G train) connecting Brooklyn and Queens only. All but two of the 468 stations of the subway are served 24 hours a day. Twenty-four hour train service is very rare globally. The other American rapid transit systems that share this distinction are portions of the Chicago ‘L’, the PATH, and the PATCO Speedline.
Many lines and stations have both express and local service. These lines have three or four tracks: normally, the outer two are used for local trains, and the inner one or two are used for express trains. Stations served by express trains are typically major transfer points or destinations. The BMT Jamaica Line uses skip-stop service on portions, whereby two services operate over the line during rush hours and certain stations are only served by one of the two.
Lines and RoutesMany rapid transit systems run relatively static routings, so that a train “line” is more or less synonymous with a train “route”. In New York, routings change often as new connections are opened or service patterns change. Within the nomenclature of the subway, the “line” describes the physical railroad track or series of tracks that a train “route” uses on its way from one terminal to another. “Routes” (also called “services”) are distinguished by a letter or a number and “Lines” have names. They are also designations for trains, as exemplified in the Billy Strayhorn song Take the “A” Train. This terminology is also used to a loose extent in the Taipei Rapid Transit System.
There are 24 train services in the subway system, including three short shuttles. Each route has a colour designation, representing the Manhattan trunk
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line of the particular service, and it is labelled as local or express. A separate colour is exclusively assigned to the Crosstown Line route, since it operates entirely outside Manhattan; the shuttles are all assigned dark gray. Each service is also named after its Manhattan (or crosstown) trunk line. For these reasons, the New York Subway is perhaps the most complex metro system in the world.
Though all but two subway stations are served on a 24-hour basis, some of the designated routes do not run during the late night hours or use a different routing during those hours. In addition to these regularly scheduled changes, because there is no nightly system shutdown for maintenance, tracks and stations must be maintained while the system is operating. To accommodate such work, services are usually changed during the overnight hours and on weekends.
The current colour system depicted on official subway maps was proposed by R. Raleigh D’Adamo, a lawyer who entered a contest sponsored by the Transit Authority in 1964. D’Adamo proposed replacing a map that used only three colours (representing the three operating entities of the subway network) with a map that used a different colour for each service. D’Adamo’s contest entry shared first place with two others and led the Transit Authority to adopt a multi-coloured scheme. (D’Adamo subsequently earned a master’s degree in transportation planning and engineering from Polytechnic University and worked for transit authorities, including a stint at the MTA, and was responsible for organizing and building what today is the Westchester County Bee-Line bus
system.) However, the lines and services are not referred to by colour (e.g., Blue line or Green line), although the colours are often assigned through their groups.
Subway MapThe current official transit maps of the New York City Subway are based on a 1979 design by Michael Hertz Associates. The maps are relatively (though not entirely) geographically accurate, with the major exception of Staten Island, the size of which has been greatly reduced. This causes them to appear, in the eyes of some observers, as unnecessarily cluttered and unwieldy compared to the more traditional type of plan used for most urban rail and metro maps; a schematic, or diagram. The map is recognized, however, with helping tourists navigate the city, as major city streets are shown alongside the subway stations serving them. The newest edition of the subway map, which took effect on June 27, 2010, reflects the latest service changes and also makes Manhattan even bigger and Staten Island even smaller.
Part of the reason for the current incarnation is that earlier diagrams of NYC Subway (the first being produced in 1958), while perhaps being more aesthetically pleasing, had the perception of being geographically inaccurate. The design of the subway map by Massimo Vignelli, published by the MTA between 1974 and 1979, has since become recognized in design circles as a modern classic; however, the MTA deemed the map was flawed due to its placement of geographical elements.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway [Accessed 20/12/10] .
30 Route Line
Broadway – Seventh Avenue Local
Seventh Avenue Express
Seventh Avenue Express
Lexington Avenue Express
Lexington Avenue Express
Lexington Avenue Local/Express
Flushing Local/Express
42nd Street Shuttle
A Division (IRT)
B Division (BMT/IND)
Route Line Route Line
Eighth Avenue Express Canarsie Local
Sixth Avenue Express Sixth Avenue Local
Eighth Avenue Local Broadway Local
Sixth Avenue Express Broadway Express
Eighth Avenue Local Broadway Local
Sixth Avenue Local Franklin Avenue Shuttle
Crosstown Local Rockaway Park Shuttle
Nassau Street Express Nassau Street Express
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway [Accessed 20/12/10].
New York Subway Lines
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1972 Map of the New York Subway System by Massimo Vignelli
Reference: http://www.minilistic.com/2009/12/new-york-subway-map-1972/ [Accessed 20/12/10].
New York Subway
Historical Maps
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Metro Maps
Paris Metro Map
The Paris Métro or Métropolitain (French: Métro de Paris) is the rapid transit metro system in Paris. It has become a symbol of the city, noted for its density with the city limits and its uniform architecture influenced by Art Nouveau. The network’s sixteen lines are mostly underground and run to 214 km (133 mi) in length. There are 300 stations (384 stops), of which 62 facilitate transfer to another line.
Paris has one of the densest metro networks in the world, with 245 stations within 86.9 km² (34 sq mi) of the City of Paris. Lines are numbered 1 to 14, with two minor lines, 3bis and 7bis. The minor lines were originally part of lines 3 and 7 but became independent.
Lines are identified on maps by number and colour. Direction of travel is indicated by the destination terminus.
Paris is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow. It carries 4.5 million passengers a day, and an annual total of 1.479 billion (2009). Châtelet-Les Halles, with 5 Métro lines and three RER commuter rail lines, is the world’s largest underground station.
The first line opened without ceremony on 19 July 1900, during the Exposition Universelle. The system expanded quickly until the First World War and the core was complete by the 1920s. Extensions into suburbs (together with Line 11) were built in the 1930s.
Since the Métro was built to comprehensively serve the city inside its walls the stations are very close: on
average, 548 metres apart on average, ranging down to 424m on line 4 and up to one kilometre on the newer line 14, meaning Paris is heavily pockmarked with stations. In contrast, the surrounding suburbs are only served by later line extensions, thus traffic from one suburb to another must pass through the city. The slow commercial speed effectively prohibits service to the greater Paris area.
The Paris Métro is an essentially underground (197 km of 214 km), surface runs consists of the viaduct sections within Paris (on lines 1, 2, 5 & 6) and the suburban ends of lines 1, 5, 8, and 13. The system’s tunnels are relatively close to the surface due to the variable nature of Paris’s earth which does not permit deep digging; exceptions include parts of line 12 under the hill of Montmartre and line 2 under Ménilmontant. Instead the tunnels follow the twisting lie of the streets.
The Métro has 214 km (133 mi) of track and 300 stations (384 stops), 62 connecting between lines. These figures do not include the RER network. Trains stop at all stations. Lines do not share tracks, even at interchange (transfer) stations.
Reference: Paris Metro Map Illustration by Antoine & Manuel. http://design-crisis.com/?p=349 [Accessed 17/12/10].
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Paris Metro Lines
Line Opened Last Extension
Stations Served
Length Average Interstation
Journeys (per annum)
Termini
1900 1992 25 16.6 km / 10.3 miles
692 m 213,921,408 La Défense Château de Vincennes
1900 1903 25 12.3 km / 7.7 miles
513 m 95,945,503 Porte Dauphine Nation
1904 1971 25 11.7 km / 7.3 miles
488 m 91,655,659 Pont de Levallois Gallieni
1971 1971 4 1.3 km / 0.8 miles
433 m Porte des Lilas Gambetta
1908 1910 26 10.6 km /6.6 miles
424 m 155,348,608 Porte de ClignancourtPorte d’Orléans
1906 1985 22 14.6 km / 9.1 miles
695 m 92,778,870 Bobigny Place d’Italie
1909 1942 28 13.6 km / 8.5 miles
504 m 104,102,370 Charles de Gaulle - Étoile Nation
1910 1987 38 22.4 km / 13.9 miles
605 m 121,341,833 La Courneuve Villejuif Mairie d’Ivry
1967 1967 8 3.1 km / 1.9 miles
443 m Louis Blanc Pré Saint-Gervais
1913 1974 37 22.1 km / 13.8 miles
614 m 92,041,135 Balard Créteil
1922 1937 37 19.6 km / 12.2 miles
544 m 119,885,878 Pont de Sèvres Mairie de Montreuil
1923 1981 23 11.7 km / 7.3 miles
532 m 40,411,341 Boulogne Gare d’Austerlitz
1935 1937 13 6.3 km / 3.9 miles
525 m 46,854,797 Châtelet Mairie des Lilas
1910[12] 1934 28 13.9 km / 8.6 miles
515 m 81,409,421 Porte de la Chapelle Mairie d’Issy
1911[12] 2008 32 24.3 km / 15.0 miles
776 m 114,821,166 Châtillon - Montrouge Saint-Denis Les Courtilles
1998 2007 9 9 km / 5.6 miles
1,129 m 62,469,502 Saint-Lazare Olympiades
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro [Accessed 20/12/10].
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Historical Maps
Paris Metro
1922
1937
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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1939
1999
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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Metro Maps
Tokyo Subway Map
The Tokyo subway is an integral part of the world’s most extensive rapid transit system in a single metropolitan area, Greater Tokyo. While the subway system itself is largely within the city centre, the lines extend far out via extensive through services onto suburban railway lines.
As of June 2008, the entire network of Tokyo Metro, Toei, and Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit has 282 stations and 14 lines. The Tokyo Metro and Toei networks together carry a combined average of close to eight million passengers daily. Despite being ranked first in worldwide subway usage, subways make up a small fraction of heavy rail rapid transit in Tokyo alone—only 282 out of 882 railway stations, as of 2007.
There are two primary subway operators in Tokyo:• Tokyo Metro. Formerly Teito Rapid Transit
Authority (Eidan), privatized in 2004 and presently operating 168 stations and nine lines. The minimum price for one ride is 160 yen.
• Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation (Toei). An arm of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, operates 106 stations in four lines. The minimum price for one ride is 170 yen.
In addition:• The Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit (TWR)
operates a single mostly-underground line with eight stations.
• Saitama Railway Line which is essentially an extension of the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line operates a single mostly-underground line with eight stations.
The Yamanote Line and the Chou-Sobu Line are not subway lines, but above-ground busy commuter lines which operate with metro-like frequencies and trains owned by JR East. They act as key transportation arteries in central Tokyo, and are often marked on Tokyo subway maps.
Many above-ground and underground lines in the Greater Tokyo Area operate through services with the Tokyo Metro and Toei lines so that in a broader meaning they consist a part of the Tokyo subway network.
The Yokohama Subway (and the planned Kawasaki Subway) also operate in the Greater Tokyo Area, but they are not directly linked to the Tokyo subway network. However, on special occasions (typically holiday weekends), the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line and Namboku Line operate special Minato Mirai (みなとみらい号, Minatomirai-go) direct through services onto Yokohama’s fully underground Minatomirai Line via the Tokyo Toyoko Line railway. From 2012, the Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin Line will also have regular through service to the Minatomirai Line.
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Tokyo Subway Lines
Asakusa Line
Mita Line
Shinjuku Line
Oedo Line
Ginza Line
Marunouchi Line
Hibiya Line
Tozai Line
Chiyoda Line
Yurakucho Line
Hanzomon Line
Namboku Line
Fukutoshin Line
The Tokyo Subway Network
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway [Accessed 20/12/10].
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Historical Maps
Tokyo Subway
1969
1972
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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1989
1998
Reference: OVENDEN, M., 2003. Metro maps of the world. Middlesex : Capital Transport Publishing.
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Dissecting Metro Maps – Logo
Metro Logos
Moscow MetroLondon Underground
Berlin S & U-Bahn
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Paris Metro
Tokyo Subway
New York Subway
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Dissecting Metro Maps – Typeface
London
Berlin
New York
P22 Underground based on Johnston Sans – Edward Johnston
FF Transport – Meta Design
Helvetica – Max Miedinger & Eduard Hoffmann
West Acton
Union Sq
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Tokyo
Paris
Moscow
Shin-go
Parisine – Jean-François Porchez.
Unknown Cyrillic Typeface
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The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway
There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? 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. These four strands are woven together, over nine pages, to tell a story that ultimately transcends the simple issue of Helvetica and the subway.
The LabyrinthAs any New Yorker—or visitor to the city—knows, the subway system is a labyrinth. This is because it is an amalgamation of three separate systems, two of which incorporated earlier urban railway lines. The current New York subway system was formed in 1940 when the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit) and the IND (Independent) lines were merged. The IRT lines date to 1904; the BMT lines to 1908 (when it was the BRT, or Brooklyn Rapid Transit); and the IND to 1932. Portions of the IRT and BMT lines originated as elevated train lines, some dating back to 1885.
The first “signs” in the New York City subway system were created by Heins & LaFarge, architects of
the IRT. In 1904 they established the now-familiar tradition of mosaic station names on platform walls. The name tablets were composed of small tiles in both serif and sans serif roman capitals. The BRT/BMT followed suit under Squire J. Vickers, who took over the architectural duties in 1908. Neither line had a uniform lettering style even though the designs were prepared in studio and then shipped in sections to the stations. Thus, there is a surprising amount of variety within the mosaic station names. Smaller directional signs—with arrows indicating exits from each station—were also made in mosaic tile in both serif and sans serif roman capitals. Vickers simplified the decorative borders surrounding the name tablets but did not alter the lettering styles of either the IRT or the BMT. However, when the IND was established in 1925, he created a new style of sans serif capitals to accompany the stripped-down decoration of the stations. These letters, inspired by Art Deco, were heavier and more geometric than the earlier sans serifs rooted in 19th-century grotesques. 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.
Heins & LaFarge also “hung large, illuminated porcelain-enamel signs over the express platforms, using black type [actually hand-lettering] on a white background and painted station names on the round cast-iron columns.” The latter were replaced in 1918 when Vickers commissioned enamel signs from both Nelke Signs (later Nelke Veribrite Signs) and the Baltimore Enamel Company. The two companies continued to make enamel signs throughout the 1930s, placing them on girder columns as well as cast-iron ones. Vickers’ goal was to make it easier
Paul Shaw
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for riders to quickly recognize their stop upon entering a station. The abbreviated station names on the porcelain-enamel signs were rendered in condensed sans serif capitals derived from common sign-painting models. For the IND Vickers also added a second set of modular tiles for the station names. These were integrated into the station walls rather than being attached to the platform columns. The lettering of these signs is in a spur serif style—common in 19th-century sign-painting manuals—that is reminiscent of social invitation typefaces such as Copperplate Gothic.
Beginning in the early 1950s, stations were systematically lengthened to accommodate newer and longer cars. The station walls were covered with simple glazed tiles in dull green, ochre, blue and other solid colours. Station names were silk-screened on the tiles in black geometrically constructed condensed sans serif letters. (The Grand Street station uses Delft blue letters instead.)
As if this plethora of signs were not enough, the subway system also had a bewildering variety of other porcelain enamel and hand-painted signs. The porcelain enamel signs, either hung from the ceiling or posted on the walls, were directional as well as informational. The directional signs included those on the outside of the station entrances as well as those intended for the corridors and platforms underground. Many of the informational signs warned against criminal, dangerous or unhealthy behaviour: no peddling wares, no leaning over the tracks, no crossing the tracks, no smoking, no spitting. The directional and informational ones were made by Nelke Veribrite Signs and the Baltimore Enamel Company, while the behavioural ones were the product of the Manhattan Dial Company. Most were lettered in some form of sans serif capitals—regular, condensed, square-countered, chamfered, outlined—though some were in bracketed or slab serif roman capitals. They were usually white letters on a coloured background (often dark green for the IND and dark blue for the IRT and BMT), yet many were also black on a white background. There was no house style.
Hand-painted signs were added to the subway system as far back as the mid-1930s—maybe earlier—and were still being used three decades later. (In fact, some can still be seen today at stations such as Forest Hills/Continental Avenue in Queens.) Some were temporary in nature—lettered on easel boards—and others were more permanent. The latter, usually informational in nature—such as the location of toilets—were painted on corridor walls in red and black grotesque capitals. There is evidence that when they faded or became scuffed, they were simply repainted.
Bringing Order Out of ChaosThe untenable mess of overlapping sign systems finally got attention in 1957 when George Salomon, typographic designer at Appleton, Parsons & Co., made an unsolicited proposal to the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) entitled “Out of the Labyrinth: A plea and a plan for improved passenger information in the New York subways.” The unpublished typescript anticipated many of the suggestions for overhauling the signage of the subway system that Unimark would make a decade later. Salomon suggested that the distinctions among the IRT, BMT and IND be abolished and replaced by five major trunk lines and eleven subsidiary routes. The trunk lines would be colour-coded and identified by a letter and the branch lines by a derivative letter/number combination. Thus, Salomon’s system consisted of the Lexington Avenue line (B, blue), the Broadway BMT line (C, purple), the Sixth Avenue line (D, orange), Seventh Avenue line (E, red) and Eighth Avenue line (F, green). The Seventh Avenue line branched off into single lines, designated E1 through E5. Similar markings were used for the other subsidiary lines. Salomon proposed that the colour-coding be used for the trains, signage and maps to ensure consistency and uniformity throughout the subway system. He also wanted the signage to be standardized. His preference was for signs to be set in Futura Demi-bold—which he claimed was the most legible face available—set in white on a black background and supported by large directional arrows. Salomon concluded his proposal by stating:
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“It’s a big job. But for the sake of the subway itself and for the sake of the city it serves and for the people of that city it must be done soon.”
The only one of Salomon’s ideas that was taken up by the TA (short for NYCTA) was his suggestion for a colour-coded route map. His subway map design, heavily influenced by Henry Beck’s famous map for the London Underground, was published in 1958. It was the first official map issued by the TA since its inception in 1953—and the first to show the entire system. (Maps issued by the Board of Transit, the TA’s predecessor, were produced by private companies such as Hagstrom Maps.) Salomon’s map was not as ambitious as his “Out of the Labyrinth” ideas. The IRT lines were coloured black, the BMT lines green and the IND lines red. The map was set in a mix of News Gothic, News Gothic Bold, Standard and Times Roman—no Futura.
Apparently, the TA did make some kind of an attempt in 1958 to improve the signage within the subway system. It engaged Ladislav Sutnar to design exit signs for the stations but they were not “properly implemented” by the TA’s sign shop—an portent of what Unimark was to face a decade later. No further details about the assignment are known.
Signage in the 1960sIn the 1960s, urban planners, architects and graphic designers, both here and in Europe, took an interest in the systematic design of signage for cities, highways, railways, subways and airports. At the beginning of the decade, two publications, published almost simultaneously, touched on the issues: Lettering on Buildings (1960), by Nicolete Gray, and Sign Language for Buildings and Landscape (1961), by Mildred Constantine and Egbert Jacobson. Unfortunately, Gray did not examine transportation system signage, and Constantine and Jacobson devoted only a few sentences and images to the topic, primarily focusing on above-ground signs for the Paris Metro and London Underground. Their lone image of signage within an underground railway system was, surprisingly, from the Philadelphia subway.
One reason for this lacuna is that, at the time, coordinated subway sign systems were rare. New York was not the only major city to have a visual mess underground. Even the famed Paris Métro was plagued by a welter of different styles of signs that was not brought under control until 1971, when Métro, designed by Adrian Frutiger and based on his Univers typeface, was introduced. The lone exception to this state of affairs was London where Johnston Railway Sans—designed by calligrapher Edward Johnston at the behest of Frank Pick, publicity manager at London Transport—had been in use since 1916 for signage as well as on posters and advertising.
The first coherent transportation sign system was created by Colin Forbes in 1961 for the Oceanic Building at Heathrow Airport. Now called Terminal 3, the Oceanic Building was the second terminal to be built at the airport. Forbes’ sign system for it employed modular panels with sans serif lettering in black on white (though white on black was allowed for some levels of information) combined with arrows. Guidelines for spacing and sizing the letters were an essential aspect of the system. For the lettering, Forbes, who had a solo practice at the time, hired a young Matthew Carter (b. 1937) to design a custom grotesque. The design, eventually called Airport, was based on Standard (as Akzidenz-Grotesk was then called in England), which Forbes praised for its “simple, bold, easily identifiable letterforms with an individual but unaggressive personality.” Carter drew a special weight, increased the x-height and amended several individual letters (principally replacing the angled terminals of c, e and s with horizontal ones).
The result looked a lot like Helvetica Medium. Forbes acknowledged this years later in A Sign Systems Manual (1970) when he wrote: “Since this amended design was produced a new typeface, Helvetica, has been issued. Helvetica incorporates many of the adaptations made to Standard and it is now often used for signs by reproducing directly from printers’ and filmsetters’ type.” In 1960, when the signage for The Oceanic Building was being planned, Forbes and
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Carter were unaware of the existence of Helvetica. “If we’d known about it,” Carter said in 2007 to Alice Rawsthorn of the International Herald Tribune, “I’m sure we would have used it, since it’s a much better typeface than the one I drew.”
All of the elements of the Oceanic Building sign system resurfaced in other transportation sign systems of the 1960s. In November 1964, work on the M1 (Red) line, the first of the three-line Metropolitana Milanese, was completed. Franco Albini and Franca Helg did the station designs, while the signage was by Bob Noorda, who was also responsible for suggesting the colour-coding of the system’s three lines. 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. His sign system for the Milan metro involved modular enamel strip signs placed along the station walls at consistent intervals. Along with the platform signage Noorda designed route diagrams, neighbourhood maps, clock faces and posters for each station. The entire Milan system won Noorda and the architects the Premio Compasso d’Oro in 1964.
The lettering for the Milan metro signs was a modified version of Helvetica drawn by Noorda himself. Finding the available weights of Helvetica to be either too bold or too light, Noorda created an intermediate weight. He also reduced the height of the capitals and ascenders and the depth of the descenders to make a more compact design. Several characters were drawn following those of Akzidenz-Grotesk: Q, R and 2, for instance. The letters were designed to be white reversed out of a red matte background. Station names and exit signs were set in all caps while informational signs were set in upper- and lowercase characters. Noorda established a spacing system for his custom typeface.
Noorda was not the only designer in the early 1960s dissatisfied with Helvetica as a face for transportation signage. In 1964, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, of Kinneir Calvert Associates, designed Rail Alphabet as part of a comprehensive
sign system for British Railways done in parallel with a full corporate identity program by Design Research Unit (DRU). Their typeface was a modified version of Helvetica Bold, available in both positive and negative versions. The capitals, ascenders and descenders were all reduced, while the Q and 2 were modelled after Standard. The individual letters—as well as arrows and the new British Rail logo—were made as individual artwork tiles for easy assembly and spacing. The British Rail identity, including Rail Alphabet, was unveiled in 1965.
Work on Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, designed by M. Duintjer and Kho Liang Le, began in 1962. The sign system design was carried out by Benno Wissing, of Total Design, who used an altered Standard—ascenders and descenders chopped down—as the typeface. With the exception of the gate designations, the signs were set in all lowercase letters. The colours were a combination of black and white on either yellow or green backgrounds. The system was publicized in 1965 but the airport did not open until two years later.
The same year that the Red Line of the Metropolitana Milanese opened, plans for modernizing the Boston subway system were announced. The newly created Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) awarded the contract for station renovation in January 1965 to Cambridge Seven Associates, a multidisciplinary architectural and design firm led by architect Peter Chermayeff. The design partners in the firm, Ivan Chermayeff and Thomas Geismar, were responsible for the station graphics. They created a new symbol for the Boston system (a black sans serif T in a circle), colour-coded its four lines (and renamed them red, blue, orange and green), designed a Beck-inspired diagrammatic map, and established a uniform typographic style for all signage in the subway and bus system.
The enamel signs were split in half horizontally with white lettering on a coloured background at the top for the name of each station and black letters on a white background below for additional information about each stop. The typeface, used on maps as
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well as the signs, was Helvetica Medium. “As to the choice of Helvetica, it’s a bit fuzzy,” Geismar said recently, “but I recall that we were generally excited to have a machine-set version, and felt that its directness was appropriate to our whole effort to simplify and clarify the MBTA transit system. Also, as part of the program, I had designed the T in the circle to identify and rename the system, and that featured a very simple, Helvetica-like T.” The MBTA signage was publicly introduced in August 1965, but the first renovated station—Arlington Street—did not open until October 1967. It was the first transportation signage system to use Helvetica without modifications.
The NYCTA and Unimark InternationalAt the same time that Milan was opening the first line of its new metro system and Boston was overhauling its T system, the New York City subway was still bumbling along. But the 1964/1965 World’s Fair, in Flushing, Queens, pressured the NYCTA to improve its image and information graphics. They commissioned a new logo for the agency from Sundberg-Ferar, an industrial design firm responsible for designing a new subway car, and they created special strip maps (set in Futura) for use on the No. 7 Flushing Line. The TA also decided to hold a competition for a new map.
The 1964 TA map competition was apparently the idea of Len Ingalls, director of public information and community relations at the agency, who was eager to see if the London Underground map’s colour-coding could be applied to the New York City subway map. The contest—judged by Harmon H. Goldstone, head of the New York City Planning Commission, and Jerry Donovan, cartographer for Time magazine—drew only nine entries. Four were awarded $3,000 prizes but none were chosen as a final winner. The best one, Raleigh D’Adamo’s submission, emulated London’s seven-colour coding system but was deemed “too complex for general use.” Goldstone later said that there was no winner “because a good map is not possible for a system which lacks intellectual order and precision”. In the wake of this disaster, Prof. Stanley A. Goldstein, a
professor of engineering at Hofstra University, was hired as a consultant in January 1965 to devise a map that would successfully solve the colour-coding problem posed by New York City’s tangled subway system. Six months later he submitted a 39-page report entitled “Methods of Improving Subway Information” that went beyond ideas for a new map to include suggestions on “train designations, car information and station information.” Goldstein’s recommendations did not bear immediate fruit, but they set in motion the events that eventually led the NYCTA to hire Unimark International.
The new Milan metro finally came to the notice of the American design community in 1965. Industrial designer William Lansing Plumb, in the September/October 1965 issue of Print, compared the London, Milan and New York—but not Boston—subway systems. He angrily described the latter as “grimy, dingy and slum-like,” complaining that the original beauty of the mosaic decorations of Heins & LaFarge and Vickers had been covered over in the intervening decades by dirt and grime, as well as advertising and newer signs. He also criticized the new TA logo by Sundberg-Ferar as dated. In contrast Plumb praised Noorda’s graphics—including his use of a “modified grotesque” typeface—for the Milan metro, suggesting that they could be applied to New York City. His suggestion proved prescient.
In late 1965, Massimo Vignelli, a Milanese graphic designer, moved to New York City. He had come to the United States to head up the New York office of Unimark International, an international design consultancy established earlier that year. The firm was the brainchild of Vignelli and Ralph Eckerstrom, former design director of Container Corporation of America (CCA). 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. In establishing Unimark they sought to wed American marketing to European modernist design. Along with Vignelli and Eckerstrom, the other founding partners of the firm were Bob Noorda, Jay Doblin, James K. Fogleman and Larry
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Klein. Herbert Bayer, the former Bauhausler, served as a consultant, giving Unimark immediate legitimacy.
Within months of Vignelli’s arrival in New York, Unimark gained a plum assignment. In May 1966, the NYCTA, on the recommendation of the Museum of Modern Art, hired the firm to advise it on signage and to assess Prof. Goldstein’s report—new maps meant new signs. The recommendation came from Mildred Constantine, associate curator in the department of architecture and design at MoMA. It is likely that the TA turned to Constantine because of her long-standing interest in signs and her intimate knowledge of graphic design. She curated the exhibition “Signs in the Street” at MoMA in 1954 and later co-authored Sign Language for Buildings and Landscape. She was on the AIGA board of directors and was well familiar with graphic design firms, especially the nascent Unimark. Constantine had met both Vignelli and Eckerstrom in 1959 when all three served as jurors on the Art Directors Club of Chicago’s annual competition. And, most importantly, she was aware of Noorda’s graphics for the Metropolitana Milanese from having served in 1964 on the United States selection committee for the 13th Triennale di Milano. Unimark had the connections and it had the experience.
With the hiring of Unimark it seemed that the TA had finally realized the need to rectify the Piranesian situation underground. But the assignment was brief—Unimark was expected to submit their report by September 1966—and ultimately very unsatisfying. In the summer Noorda flew to New York to carry out a detailed survey of the traffic flow at five key subway stations: Times Square, Grand Central Station, Broadway/Nassau, Jay Street and Queensborough Plaza. Previously, the NYCTA had sent him architectural drawings of each station, but they were not at the same time and he had difficulty coordinating them. Noorda spent three weeks as a “mole” tracking the paths of commuters in these stations to find the essential message points—entering/exiting, transferring—for each sign. He plotted decision points on a tree diagram. And, as in Milan, he viewed signs in perspective to test their
legibility. He and Vignelli then created a modular sign system with different components for the arrows, route designations—using the color-coding proposed earlier by Goldstein—and train information. The text was black on a white background; the typeface was Standard. Three sizes of type were established to distinguish different levels of information. A modular support system for the signs—in which they fit into black metal channels suspended from the ceiling by black struts—was created since the TA insisted that no structural changes could be made to the stations. Noorda returned to Milano to have prototype signs mocked up. These were shipped to New York where additional presentation boards were created. Then, according to architectural critic Peter Blake, Vignelli and Noorda made their presentation, were “thanked and, apparently, forgotten.”
The TA was glad to have Unimark’s advice, but nothing more. It did not have enough money to pay Unimark to create a complete manual of design recommendations or even an explanation of the modular system; and it failed to ask for a working document. Instead the TA sought to carry out the proposals on its own using its in-house sign shop. The result was, in Vignelli’s words, “the biggest mess in the world.” The TA’s Bergen Street Sign Shop ignored the modular system, misinterpreted the black stripe at the top of the drawings (which indicated the metal channel housing holding the signs) as a design element, rendered the type by hand rather than photomechanically and did not space the letters to Vignelli’s satisfaction. “It had never occurred to us that they would carry out the proposals in their own shop,” Vignelli said. “We were able to give them a little instruction, but not enough. Whenever we inquired how the project was going, they were very optimistic. We weren’t even allowed to inspect it.” The new signs were often installed on top of old ones, creating more confusion in the subway system. The whole clash between the Bergen Street “sign painters”—as Vignelli called them—and the designers at Unimark reflected fundamentally different expectations between craftsmen and designers. The former were intent on making signs while the latter were interested in sign systems.
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Lack of money was the principal explanation for the TA’s refusal to allow Unimark to oversee the implementation of their signage recommendations, but several other factors were probably at work as well: bureaucratic inertia, labour union rules and outside political forces. 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.
The Big SwitchThe Chrystie Street Connection—the largest overhaul of the New York City subway system since unification in 1940—opened on November 26, 1967. The Connection linked the former IND Sixth Avenue Line east of Broadway-Lafayette with the BMT Nassau Street Line via the Manhattan Bridge. It was the first true integration of the IND and BMT and resulted in the creation of a new station at Grand Street, eight new routes and several new free-transfer points. The massive changeover was accompanied by a set of new maps overseen by Prof. Goldstein and the first Unimark signs, both of which incorporated new colour-coding and naming for all of the subway lines.
The “big switch” was announced well in advance by the NYCTA, and newspaper columns explained the changes in detail several days beforehand. Still, the opening of the Chrystie Street Connection did not go smoothly. Under the headline “Riders Burn as TA Pulls the Switch,” the New York Post described the confusion and chaos that reigned at several of the affected stations, especially in Brooklyn. Passengers were unable to quickly absorb the new train routes and designations, nor the introduction of free transfer points. Confusion was not limited to the subway passengers. “A mild panic set in at the Atlantic Av. station when TA officials arrived early to find old signs still hanging,” the Post wrote. “They quickly ordered the old signs and maps covered with newspapers before the rush set in.” Atlantic Avenue was one of the stations where free transfers between the IND and the IRT were instituted for the first time. However, despite the presence of Unimark-designed red, gray and blue metal “Transfer Exit” signs directing them
to the Lexington Avenue and Seventh Avenue Lines, passengers did not fully grasp their meaning and the TA was forced to add “hand-lettered cardboard signs” announcing free transfers.
Goldstein’s suite of maps—a large wall map for the platforms, a mini-map for the new routes, individual strip maps for each route and a new overall system map—and Unimark’s signs failed to prevent commuter confusion because they were not fully supported by the route designators on the trains. According to the Post and the New York Daily News, many trains still had their old route numbers and letters. The schematic maps themselves may also have been at fault, if one is to believe Blake. “The new maps and diagrams were quite stunning in composition and in colour… but, unfortunately, they failed to communicate,” he wrote in New York magazine in April 1968. He described them as “a battlefield filled with typographers and colour-experts locked in mortal combat.” Unimark’s signs escaped criticism, but it was clear there were not enough of them. They were only installed on the platforms and not throughout the stations as Vignelli had urged. “Flubway”—as the Daily News dubbed it—made clear what the NYCTA already knew. It needed to do more to make the subway system navigable. Merely installing a few new signs was not the same as implementing a coordinated sign system.
A month before the Chrystie Street Connection opened, the NYCTA publicly announced that it had hired Unimark to “devise a new system of signage.” The announcement was part of a presentation on the New York City subway by Daniel T. Scannell, one of the three TA commissioners, at the “Transportation Graphics: Where Am I Going? How Do I Get There?” symposium held October 23 at MoMA. Among the other speakers, assembled by Constantine, were Jock Kinneir, Peter Chermayeff and Noorda. If the NYCTA was not already aware of the gap between its own transportation signage and that for British Rail, the Boston T and the Metropolitana Milanese, they certainly knew after the close of the symposium. In fact, Arlington Street, the first of Boston’s renovated T stations, had finally opened that month to much
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publicity and praise. Ironically, The New York Times waited until November 28 to profile the station, placing the article next to one detailing the problems caused by the “big switch” in New York. That must have really stung the NYCTA.
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. Certainly by early 1968—if not fall 1967—Unimark had been rehired to prepare a comprehensive set of guidelines covering the design, fabrication and installation of signs for the subway system. The MoMA symposium coupled with the Chrystie Street Connection fiasco made it clear to the commissioners that they could not continue to do things the old way. In December 1967, the TA undertook a comprehensive survey of the subway system to determine how many signs it needed and where they should be posted. This marked the first about-face from the way the agency had been doing business. Previously, it had ignored Unimark’s broader ideas about signage. As Vignelli recalls, “We designed the system to standardize the production and accelerate the implementation. No way. They were still doing all the signs individually—one here, another there, without a precise implementation plan. I wanted to do one line at a time; they were doing a station here and there, just like they have done since the beginning of the subways.” It is doubtful that the TA adopted Vignelli’s line-by-line approach, but they certainly sped up the pace of installation in the wake of the events of November 26. By the end of June 1968, they were boasting that “3,000 new signs had been installed at 100 stations and old ones removed to reduce visual clutter.”
The detailed survey carried out by the TA in December 1967 was a necessary follow-up to Noorda’s mid-1966 investigations and an essential prelude to Unimark’s subsequent formulation of comprehensive signage guidelines. Noorda had looked only at critical subway stations—those with the most traffic in the system—but now the TA needed to examine the entire system (or at least
those stations affected by the Chrystie Street Connection route changes). During 1968 and 1969, Unimark worked on the guidelines while juggling work for its corporate clients. The New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual was finally issued in 1970. It included Noorda’s traffic-flow research of mid-1966, the TA’s station December 1967 survey results, and some of the original design and fabrication specifications presented to the TA in fall 1966. But it also built upon those specifications to include precise manufacturing instructions, explicit spacing guidelines, a glossary of terms, semantic rules for the information to be included on signs, examples of mandatory signs as well as informational and directional ones, and suggestions for a line map intended for use inside subway cars and a directory to aid riders seeking the best way to get from point A to point B via the subway. It also replaced Goldstein’s Munsell Color System for the route disks with equivalent colours from the Pantone Matching System.
As if in response to the confusion engendered by the “big switch,” the first page of the manual emphatically insisted,that there “must be no overlapping of old and new signs. All signs erected previous to this program should be removed.” It was a brave statement, but not a practical one given both the extensive nature of the New York City subway system—at that time it consisted of 484 stations—and the NYCTA’s financial situation. The manual specified modular signs—in sections of 1, 2, 4 and 8 feet in length—with black type on a white background. Three types of signs were prescribed: station identification, exit and transfer signs (with a cap height of 9 inches); directional signs (with a cap height of 4 1/4 inches); and informational and small temporary signs (with a cap height of 1 3/8 inches). Wordspacing, letterspacing, leading and the number of lines per sign were carefully detailed. The typeface was Standard Medium.
“Research has shown that the most ‘appropriate’ typeface for this purpose [a quickly and easily read sign] is a regular sans serif,” the manual stated. “Of the various weights of sans serif available, Standard
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Medium has been found to offer the easiest legibility from any angle, whether the passenger is standing, walking or riding.” The inadvertent black band at the top of the signs was now accepted as part of their look: “The 1 5/8” black band at the type of the panel represents a structural device to which the panels are fastened. Whenever the panel requires a different structure, the black band should be part of the graphics on the sign.” The signs were still porcelain enamel, but the reproduction of elements was to be “by photographic means only” via silk-screening with die-cut film. Temporary signs, made with vinyl adhesive letters, were the exception. These requirements were clearly set in response to the Bergen Street Sign Shop’s use of hand-cut stencils for making porcelain enamel signs and the type of makeshift signs the TA had resorted to during the Chrystie Street Connection opening.
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. Furthermore, he has stated on several occasions that he wanted to use Helvetica for the New York City subway signage but that “it was not available.” Why not?
The Myth of the Helvetica JuggernautHelvetica celebrated its 50th anniversary with a movie, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and a book. Despite all of the excitement and recognition, few people know its true history in the United States .
In the 1960s European types were imported and distributed in the United States by two companies: Amsterdam Continental and Bauer Alphabets. The latter was owned by the Bauersche Giesserei of Frankfurt am Main and had been in business in New York since the late 1920s, when it was responsible for introducing Futura to the American market. Amsterdam Continental, owned by Lettergieterij Amsterdam (also known as the foundry of N. Tetterode), was established in 1948. It imported types from Berthold, Stempel, Klingspor, Haas and Nebiolo as well as those from its parent company. Exactly
when Amsterdam Continental began importing Standard is unclear but it appears on several record album covers as early as 1957. From 1960 on, the company heavily promoted it to the graphic design community. Bauer countered by touting Folio, a neo-grotesque designed by Konrad Bauer and Walter Baum. In late 1960, American Type Founders (ATF) began importing Adrian Frutiger’s Univers and in 1961 it became available on monotype machines. Mergenthaler Linotype belatedly responded to the foreign invasion in 1963 with advertisements for Trade Gothic. ATF made no special attempts to sell its popular News Gothic and Franklin Gothic types—probably because none was needed. These were Helvetica’ rivals.
Helvetica began life as Neue Haas Grotesque, a new interpretation of a 19th-century grotesque (probably Akzidenz-Grotesk) conceived by Eduard Hoffmann and executed by Max Miedinger for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) in Munchenstein, Switzerland, in 1957. Three years later it was licensed by D. Stempel AG of Frankfurt (which owned shares in Haas) and renamed Helvetica. Stempel manufactured the face in foundry type and its partner German Linotype made it available in matrices—but only in mager (light) and halbfett (medium) weights. Other weights followed in the next few years. This is one reason that Noorda was unable to find the right weight of Helvetica for the Milan metro signage in 1962.
In the days of metal type, graphic designers were forced to use whatever typefaces their local printers or type houses had in stock. There was no type candy store as there are today. And printers and type houses only bought new typefaces when they thought there would be sufficient demand for them or they filled a specific stylistic niche. Buying a typeface meant buying a range of sizes and thus metal type took up a lot of space. Imported type was even more expensive—it meant shipping lead across the Atlantic—and had the further disadvantage of having to be specially manufactured for use with American printing presses. A new typeface often meant an investment of a thousand dollars or more.
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From the designers’ perspective a new typeface intended for a wide range of applications had to be available both in foundry and composition versions—the former for display use and the latter for text setting. Only a handful of sans serifs met this criteria in the early 1960s: Futura, News Gothic, Franklin Gothic, Standard and Univers. Designers were often forced to mix and match different text and display sans serifs—for example, Futura and Spartan, or News Gothic and Trade Gothic.
Helvetica joined this select group in 1963, when Stempel adapted it for the pica-point system and German Linotype prepared matrices for export. To announce Helvetica’s availability for American consumption, the foundry inserted a special double-sided red-and-black advertisement in the November/December 1963 issue of Print touting the face for “its spare simplicity, its utter legibility, its uniformity and its flawless colour.” Still, Helvetica was slow to catch on in the United States. One reason was that German Linotype mats did not align with American ones. This problem was resolved when Mergenthaler Linotype in Brooklyn began manufacturing Helvetica in February 1964. They released the 10-point version first and the remaining sizes by early 1965. At the same time, the Visual Graphic Corporation (VGC), manufacturers of the Typositor which set display phototype, offered faces “similar to” Helvetica. Linofilm Helvetica, a text phototype version of the font, was conceived by Mergenthaler in 1965 but not completed until 1967.
By 1965 Helvetica began to appear in award-winning designs and advertising, principally from graphic designers working for Unimark and CCA in Chicago, and at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It took longer for designers in New York to embrace it. The ubiquity of Helvetica, which has been both lauded and lamented since, did not take off in the United States until 1969. Vignelli has often taken credit for the spread of Helvetica in this country. This may seem like braggadocio, but his claim has a very large grain of truth in it.
Vignelli was already an enthusiastic advocate for Helvetica prior to his move to the United States. What
he most loved about it was its lack of sidebearings. This enabled him to tightly pack letters together—as in his famous posters for the Piccolo Teatro in Milan—without having to cut up galley proofs. Vignelli shared his love of Helvetica with his colleagues at Unimark and it quickly became the firm’s “house face.” The “new sans serif” was especially prized for visual identity systems such as the one Unimark developed for Varian. Not only could Helvetica be set closely but it was available in a variety of sizes and weights and on a variety of typesetting systems. More importantly, compared to its sans serif rival Standard, it was considered more harmonious in design because the terminals of c, e, s, etc., were horizontal.
Standard, Helvetica and the New York City Subway SystemAt the time the NYCTA awarded its first contract to Unimark in 1966, Helvetica was offered for sale in New York City as foundry type, linotype matrices, phototype and even transfer type. So, why was it not “available” for the subway signage? The obstacle must have been linked to the Bergen Street Sign Shop, its outside vendors and the sign making process.
In the late 1960s, the workers at the Bergen Street Sign Shop painted many signs by hand and silk-screened others, as they had done for decades. They also prepared artwork for porcelain enamel signs but did not fabricate them. That task was handled by outside vendors—most likely Nelke Sign Manufacturing Corporation, the only enamel signmaker from the Vickers era that was still in business.
Porcelain enamel signs are made by applying enamel in coats to iron or sheet metal and then heating it at a temperature of 800 degrees after each coat. Dark colours are applied before light colours. There are two methods of doing a design: stencils or screenprinting. Stencils—made from either paper or metal—are the original method, but screenprinting has been preferred since the 1960s. According to Geoffrey Clarke: “In the stencil process, the colour is sprayed on the plate and, after drying, it is of the
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consistency of weak distemper. The stencils, cut to the appropriate design, are placed on the plate and the exposed colour is brushed away, leaving the design intact. The plate is then fired and the colour vitrified indelibly on the background.” The process is repeated using additional stencils for colour in the design. In the silkscreen method the designs are usually created photomechanically and thus have more detail. Porcelain enamel signs made by the stencil process require stencil cutters and “brushers” with a high degree of skill.
One of the reasons that Vignelli was unhappy with the TA’s handling of Unimark’s 1966 signage recommendations is that they were carried out by its own sign shop. The porcelain enamel signs were apparently made by the stencil method but without highly skilled stencil cutters, leading to letters that were inexact and inconsistent. To make stencils of Standard at the large sizes recommended by Unimark it would have been necessary to either draw the “type” by eye, or enlarge it using a Goodkin Lucigraph (or Luci, a form of opaque projector) or Ludlow Typograph’s Brightype process. Although there is evidence that some signs were painted by hand, the porcelain enamel ones must have been done through enlargement. Type enlarged via a Luci had to first be proofed which meant the letters were subject to being over- or underinked. Further inaccuracies were introduced during the tracing stage, depending upon the skill of the draftsman—unless a pantograph was employed. The Brightype process avoided those pitfalls. Instead of inking the type after it was locked up, it was sprayed with black lacquer or lampblack. The printing surface was then wiped clean with a rubber pad until it was shiny. Next, the reflective form was photographed on a Brightype camera to create a photomechanical master. This film negative was used for the final enlargement. The letters were crisp and accurate. But they still had to be hand cut as stencils. Car identification numbers on several subway lines—most notably the 1 and the D trains—are still set in Standard, and close examination of them shows flat spots in the curves indicating that they were made from hand-cut stencils. By insisting on silk-screening instead of
stencilling, in the Graphic Standards Manual, Unimark was trying to avoid defects such as those that had infuriated Vignelli.
What did the Bergen Street Sign Shop workers use as a source for creating their painted and hand-cut stencil versions of Standard? Did they work from proofs of type made in-house or ordered from outside type houses? Or from specimens of type taken from a book? 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. This would have been especially true for the larger foundry sizes of the face since they would have weighed more and thus cost more—and been less likely to be used by other customers. Similar considerations would have occurred to the sign shop regarding its typesetting capabilities. Even if the shop worked from a book instead, Helvetica would not have been an option since no American type book at the time included it. Ben Rosen’s Type and Typography (1963), the principal specimen book of the day, had 17 pages of Akzidenz-Grotesk and Standard but the largest size of Standard Medium was 72-point—large by the standards of foundry type but small from the perspective of transportation signage.
The decision to use Standard instead of Helvetica may not have been as disappointing to Noorda as it was to Vignelli. While Vignelli was a strong believer in the virtues of Helvetica, Noorda was not as committed. His custom typeface for the Metropolitana Milanese was born out of dissatisfaction with both types. Although it is usually described as a modified version of Helvetica it can also be seen as a modified version of Akzidenz-Grotesk (Standard). Given how much the New York City subway sign system owes to Noorda’s work in Milan it is very likely that the choice of Standard in 1966 was his, and that Vignelli readily acquiesced because Helvetica was, for whatever technical reason, not “available” to the TA—and the sign “system” was more important than the specific face used.
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Noorda and Vignelli had an opportunity to change the NYCTA type to Helvetica when Unimark received its second contract, but they stuck with Standard. Presumably, they were more focused on insuring that the signs were properly fabricated and installed than which sans serif was used. Certainly, Vignelli had other opportunities to use Helvetica. In November 1967, the New York City Planning Department hired the New York office of Unimark to create a signage standards manual for all city agencies. To test out the signage, a prototype design for East 53rd Street—home to the Museum of Modern Art, CBS and the Seagram Building—was created. The goal was to coordinate the graphics with the street lighting and furniture—such as bus shelters, telephone booths and benches. At the same time, architect Harry Weese tapped Vignelli to design the graphics for the new Washington Metro. Neither assignment involved Noorda. Both used Helvetica. Unimark showcased all three of these signage projects in the August/September 1969 issue of Casabella. The text praised Standard for its legibility—in words taken directly from the NYCTA’s Graphics Standard Manual, still being developed—but made no mention of Helvetica.
The Fate of the Unimark SystemThe Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was created in March 1968. 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. The MTA added the NYCTA, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MaBSTOA, a subsidiary of the NYCTA created in 1962 to oversee bus routes), and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) to the mix. From the moment the MTA was born, the Rockefeller administration began making grandiose plans to modernize and coordinate the transit system. A $2.6 billion program was announced that February to expand the subway system with a Second Avenue line, a new Bronx line, an extension of one of the Queens lines, and the development of “a novel Transportation Center in the 48th Street area.” (A LIRR spur to JFK Airport was also proposed.) A few
months later, the “Fund for Better Subway Stations,” headed by real estate developer Peter Sharp, announced plans to upgrade and beautify stations in conjunction with the TA. On its own the NYCTA had already, a year earlier, set forth a station renovation program with 49th Street as a test station. All of this activity should have boded well for the Unimark signage system.
Vignelli hoped that the Graphic Standards Manual would lead to a more rational implementation of signs within the New York City subway system. But that did not happen, due to two factors: 1) the sheer size of the New York subway system and 2) the financial woes that overtook both the MTA and the city of New York in the early 1970s, culminating in the city’s rescue from bankruptcy in 1975. The 1968 “Program for Action” was largely abandoned by the end of 1975. During the gestation of the Graphic Standards Manual the NYCTA installed signs on an ad hoc basis and it continued to do so throughout the 1970s. “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. And the system is so complex that one might feel signs make very little difference—a rider may as easily find his destination by taking a chance as by any sort of careful planning.” His description is borne out by contemporary photographs that show stations with a mix of Unimark and older signs or without any Unimark signs at all even though it was over a decade since the NYCTA had first hired Vignelli and Noorda to bring order to a chaotic system.
The early 1970s were the years when the subway system was probably at its lowest ebb, along with the city itself. “Dank, overcrowded, underlit and terrifyingly labyrinthian, the New York subway at its best suggests nothing less depressing than a public lavatory; at its worst, it’s a vision of purgatory” was one contemporary description. The early 1970s were also the years when modern graffiti was born. As cars “bombed” on the outside and “tagged” on the inside rolled through the city, the subway woes and
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the graffiti explosion became intertwined in the public consciousness. “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.”
But change was already underway by 1975, when Fred Wilkinson, director of consumer affairs at the TA, convened a committee to devise a new map for the subway system to replace the one that Massimo Vignelli had designed only four years earlier. While the citizen members of the committee were focused on creating a more geographically accurate map, the agency itself was interested in showing partial-time service on 11 lines. To do this, diamonds were added to the existing circles designating each subway line. John Tauranac, committee chair, also wanted to take the existing system of depicting trains that share the same track with parallel lines and replace them with trunk lines. This posed a colour-coding problem—which meant a financial problem as well—that was not solved until Len Ingalls came up with the idea of basing colours on the “flagship” line where multiple lines ran in tandem. Ingalls’ solution meant that there would have to be a change in the colour coding of the routes. The proposed changes in the map had far-reaching ramifications: they meant that the station signage would have to be updated to insure that the two were synchronized.
By 1979—the subway system’s Diamond Jubilee year—the MTA had finally begun to get some Federal financial assistance, and the subway’s prospects were starting to slowly turn around. That summer, in an attempt to encourage more ridership, “an overall program aimed at easing passenger travel around New York City” was introduced. The 1978 MTA annual report—anticipating the program’s inception—described it thusly: “The program includes colour-coding of lines by their track routes; new station signage that conforms to the colour-code; and a new
pocket-sized geographical subway map. In addition, as roll signs are replaced, they will indicate route and destinations, as well as the colour-code.” The program—spurred by work the Tauranac committee set in place several years earlier—was expected to take up to 36 months to complete.
The real news to most people was the replacement of the controversial Vignelli-designed schematic map with a geographically based one, executed by Michael Hertz and his staff. However, in light of the problems that occurred during the opening of the Chrystie Street Connection, the intention of colour-coding all train roll signs was equally important; and so too was the news about the station signage. The new signs differed markedly from the ones that Unimark had designed in 1966 and codified in 1970. Not only did they have diamonds as well as disks as route markers and new colours for both, but they were black with white type. The errant black band at the top was replaced by a thin white line, demarcating the (nonexistent) location of the gap between sign and housing—but the typeface was still Standard.
Vignelli attributes the black/white inversion of the signs to TA worries about graffiti, while others chalk it up to concern over simple grime. Although Vignelli’s explanation is an attractive one, especially in light of the graffiti explosion that overtook the city and the subway system by 1973, the truth is that the TA made the change to increase the legibility of the signs and first contemplated doing so sometime in 1972. According to Michael Bosniak, then the MTA’s graphics manager, Jacques Nevard and Len Ingalls in public affairs requested that the “Transit Authority maintenance shop manufacture prototypes of the ‘drop-out’ reverse lettering lettering” for installation in three prototype stations in 1972–1973. This decision was made after several visual perception studies came to the attention of Nevard, but “there was a general consensus that the reversed lettering had greater legibility in the bowels of the subway system and it was adopted without any formality.”
R. Raleigh D’Adamo, head of the office of inspection and review at the MTA from 1970 to 1975, says
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that the idea of changing the signs originated with him as an offshoot of a decision to change the background colours of the route designators on the trains. “I triggered it because of my hobby interest in letterpress printing and graphics,” D’Adamo says. “I wrote a memo about it and attached a technical article on legibility of texts against different backgrounds. The test itself was done by the TA—I don’t recall who was present at the 47–50 Street station, but it could well have been Jacques and Len. A new sign of bullet [route designation circle] against a black background was prepared and installed in the south end of an empty train which was positioned in one of the pocket tracks at the then-57th Street/Sixth Avenue terminal. A regular train was alerted in advance that it would be part of a test. At the proper time, the operations department directed the empty train to leave 57th Street and advance south to 47th Street, and both trains were directed to watch for each other and enter the station together and slowly. The TA team and I stood in mid-platform. At a certain point as both trains slowly entered, they were then directed (by hand signals as I recall) to stop—opposite each other. 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. It took no time at all for all to agree that the sign with the black background was clearly the more legible. It followed like night and day and without any discussion that I can recall, that all other signage should be against a black background instead of white.” The test that D’Adamo describes may have been one of those that Bosniak recalls, suggesting that these recollections are in accord with one another. Vignelli was never involved in the decision.
Changing the Manual... AgainThe 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. Changes to the Unimark sign program were made by whiting-out specs and writing in new ones, by adding notes in the margins, by creating new diagrams from
old ones (with Standard rendered by hand), and by inserting entirely new pages of artwork. The revised manual was a work-in-progress not a polished document. Among the changes included in it were: an increase in the size of the smallest letters from 1 3/8-inch to 1 1/2-inch; the addition of diamonds to mark part-time trains—those that ran only in the day, at night, on weekends or at rush hour—and new symbols for the new “Train to the Plane,” a train dedicated to serving JFK Airport, and for buses; an expanded colour code with ten hues instead of seven; new names for seven of the routes; new artwork for the route designations with larger type; the use of black instead of white for the type in the yellow disks and diamonds; new turnstile designs; new types of signs (e.g., to indicate escalators); new symbols to mark bathrooms and handicapped access; and map panels for the station platforms. Throughout, there are reminders that “all lettering [is] to be white on black background”; and the thin white stripe is introduced in the section on “typical Column Signage.” Amidst these changes is note number 2 on page 9: “When letter ‘J’ appears in discs or diamonds—use Helvetica Style ‘J.’” This was the first official appearance of Helvetica in the sign system.
Although the decision to change the figure/ground relationship of the signs was made around 1973 and announced publicly in 1979, it took a while for the new signs to be implemented—just as it had taken years for the original Unimark signs to be introduced. Some signs were installed as early as 1978, when the TA began a program of station renovation under the guidance of in-house architect Paul Katz. But when the “We’re Changing” campaign was unveiled in 1979, the accompanying photographs and posters showed white Unimark signs being amended with route decals bearing the new colour coding and the new diamonds. These decals had a black background instead of a white or clear one, an indication that they were eventually intended to be used with white on black signs. They were a stopgap measure—the brainchild of Ingalls, who called them “pasties”—to solve the problem of quickly and economically coordinating the introduction of the new Tauranac–Hertz map with the signage in the stations.
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The MTA had expected to complete the entire colour-coding program in 36 months, but its plans fell woefully short. The Tauranac–Hertz map was issued as promised in 1979, but in 1982 the MTA announced that it had just begun to update the station signage only the year before and that it had not yet begun changing the train scroll signs. It expected to have new signs in 78 stations by the end of the year. The situation with the scroll signs was worse. The New York Times reported that they were so out-of-date that the destination signs for the AA train said “Hudson Terminal” (rather than the World Trade Center, which had replaced it over a decade earlier) and for some 7 trains they said the World’s Fair! (Things were even worse than the Times realized—the AA line had been renamed the K.) However, by the end of the 1980s—thanks to an improving economy in New York City and a series of five-year capital programs dedicated to modernizing the stations—the revised Unimark signs managed to finally permeate most of the subway system.
In 1984 Michael Hertz Associates was hired as “signage consultants to the architecture department of the TA.” Hertz’s work on the 1979 subway map had little bearing on the firm’s selection as the contract was won through a competitive bidding process. The firm prepared a second revision of the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual for the NYCTA. 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. The text was entirely typeset as were all the examples of signage. The supplement codified the major changes of the 1980 revised manual by providing high quality artwork for the new service disks and diamonds, route names and colours, and ancillary symbols. It also included guidelines for door signs and Off Hour Waiting Area signs. Although there was no mention of any change in the official typeface some of the sample illustrations used Helvetica instead of Standard. Whether actual signs were prepared with Helvetica as a result is unclear, but Helveticization was around the corner.
The process for preparing artwork for porcelain enamel signs was more professional by the time Michael Hertz Associates began working on the subway signage than it was when Unimark was first hired. This is Joseph’s description of it: “The design, so to speak, consisted of a plan showing sign locations indicated by a number. These numbers corresponded to a schedule with message, sign size and sign type (pan-formed, flat, etc.). The contractor [Michael Hertz Associates] was required to submit full-size shop drawings of each sign to the TA for approval. These shop drawings were in turn sent to a PE [porcelain enamel] manufacturer to produce either stencils or screens… from which the actual signs were fabricated.” The Bergen Street Shop was no longer involved in the process.
This Typeface Is Changing Your LifeThe myth of Helvetica’s preeminence began with Leslie Savan’s 1976 Village Voice article, “This Typeface Is Changing Your Life.” Savan tried to explain the sudden pervasiveness of the sans serif typeface in the 1970s, focusing her attention on Vignelli and Lippincott & Margulies. “Since 1967,” she wrote, “the MTA has been gradually standardizing its graphics from about a dozen typefaces to a combination of Helvetica and Standard Medium. (The two are almost identical, but the latter was more available to the MTA.)” Savan incorrectly credited the transit agency’s “graphic system” to Vignelli and Walter Kacik, making no mention of Noorda or Unimark, and she conflated the TA’s signage with the MTA’s printed matter.
Savan’s confusion was understandable. In 1973, an inter-agency marketing campaign entitled “MTA Gets You There” was launched by the MTA to boost ridership. The various printed materials—posters, brochures, maps, timetables—were intended to have a coordinated design, yet some used Standard and others Helvetica. The most prominent of the latter was the controversial and now iconic 1972 subway map designed by Vignelli. When asked recently why he had used Helvetica for the map when Standard was the typeface of the sign system, Vignelli replied that he simply “forgot” to do so. Given his devotion to
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Helvetica at the time, his answer has the ring of truth to it—especially since he set the explanatory text of the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual in it!
When Vignelli designed the subway map he was no longer a member of Unimark International. He had left the firm the year before to establish Vignelli Associates, in partnership with his wife, Lella. In designing the map Vignelli did not have to worry about using any of the TA’s in-house departments as Unimark had to do with the sign system. The artwork was created by his staff as a mechanical with type set by a type house of his own choosing. There were no reasons, technical or otherwise, not to use Helvetica. The transit agency did not complain because they had been using Helvetica here and there for various printed items since 1967. The “MTA Gets You There” campaign was only one instance of their mix-and-match sensibility.
The subway map has led many—both within and without the design professions—to assume that Vignelli designed the NYCTA signage system on his own and that it used Helvetica. 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. The manual was prepared by Michael Hertz Associates at the request of Doris Halle. In the introduction to
the MTA Sign Manual New York City Transit Authority Long Island Rail Road Metro-North Commuter Railroad, Richard Kiley, MTA chairman, called it “a first step toward the goal of unified, high-quality MTA-wide signs.” It marked the first attempt by the MTA to establish a set of consistent graphic standards for all of its constituent agencies. Although it did not go into detail, it claimed to incorporate most of the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual “as well as modifications made over the years. It fine-tunes some proven precedents.”
The 1989 MTA Manual ratified the “modifications” made in the 1980 and 1984 interim revisions to the 1970 Graphics Standards Manual. Thus, Noorda’s modular system no longer existed as physical components but only as graphical units. Signs were allowed to be a wider variety of lengths and there was a wider variety of fabrication options, including silk-screened vinyl adhesive backing for updates to the porcelain enamel signs. The thickness and position of the white stripe was officially defined. The coloured disks from 1984 were modified to take into account the addition to the system of the 9, H, Z, 1/9 and J/Z trains. Diamonds were still in existence. The 1980 sizes of type were kept. But the typeface was no longer Standard Medium—with a few exceptions.
The choice of typeface now reflected the complete MTA transportation system rather than the New York City subway by itself. The manual was an MTA product and not an NYCTA one. Helvetica Medium (with Helvetica Medium Italic) was chosen as the standard typeface for the NYCTA (including MABSTOA and Staten Island Rapid Transit); Helvetica Medium and Helvetica Medium Condensed for the LIRR; and Helvetica Medium Italic for Metro-North. There was no mention made of replacing older signs. Standard remained as part of the old artwork for the roll designators, though a diagram was included for making new discs—with Helvetica—for future line designations (such as the current V and W trains). Helvetica Medium Italic was added to describe the hours of operation for specific trains. The manual cautioned that “any other form of Helvetica (e.g., condensed, regular, etc.) or other typefaces, are
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never to be used as a substitute for Helvetica Medium or Helvetica Medium Italic.” This may have been a reference to the use in the early 1980s of Helvetica Medium Condensed on some column porcelain enamel signs.
Goodbye Standard, Hello HelveticaWhy did the MTA abandon Standard? At the time Helvetica’s popularity was on the wane, as its widespread use since the early 1970s had induced boredom and a backlash. 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.
The MTA’s embrace of Helvetica may have been out of step with the times, but it had some compelling reasons for doing so. One is that the new standards were intended to unify the MTA’s operations. Some of its commuter rail lines were already using Helvetica for their signage. The industrial design firm Peter Muller-Munk Associates of Pittsburgh—designers of the NYCTA’s two-toned M logo in 1968—had introduced it to the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) in 1969. By the early 1980s the New Haven line was sporting white signs with red bands at the top and Helvetica. And by at least 1987 the Hudson and Harlem lines of Metro-North had white signs with green bands set in Helvetica Medium Italic. The heritage of these commuter lines was reflected in the 1989 MTA Manual’s colour-coding decisions: blue for LIRR and the Harlem and Pascack Valley lines of Metro-North; green for the Hudson line of Metro-North; red for the New Haven line of Metro-North; and orange for the Port Jervis line of Metro-North. The coloured bands are all descendants of the black band the NYCTA errantly created in 1966.
A second reason is that by the end of the 1980s most MTA buses were using LED displays, which rendered the whole Standard/Helvetica debate moot. (A similar situation is now occurring with the newest subway cars that have LED displays instead of disks and roll-ups for route designations.) Since 1972, the
Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA), a subsidiary of the NYCTA, had used Standard for the route designations on the front of its buses. The signs were originally white letters on a black background but at some point they changed to white letters on a combined blue and red background—blue for the number/letter code and name and red for the route description. 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.
A third reason is that technological changes in typesetting and graphic design were overtaking the MTA Marketing & Communications Division. By the end of the 1980s the full effects of the desktop publishing revolution—touched off in 1984 by the conjunction of the Apple Macintosh, Apple LaserWriter, Adobe PostScript page description language and Aldus PageMaker software—had begun to be felt in the graphic design community. The typesetting choices faced by Unimark in 1966 had increased. The 1989 MTA Manual listed the following equipment: digital type (Linotronic), phototype (Compugraphic and typositor), tape-based lettering systems (Kroy and Merlin), computer-driven letter- and stencil-cutting systems (Gerber Signmaker), vinyl self-adhesive letters (from various manufacturers) and fabricated or cut-out letters in plastic and other materials. The only typeface that was available on all of these systems and methods was Helvetica. Furthermore, Standard had virtually “disappeared.” It was still listed in the VGC Typositor library but not in specimen books from Compugraphic, Linotype or Adobe. They offered either Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk—the true identity of Standard—or a revised version called AG Old Face. The mix-and-match mentality of the mid-1960s was no longer an option. Helvetica was the logical choice.
Helvetica actually appeared on signs in the subway system at least a few months prior to the release of the 1989 MTA Sign Manual. In October of that year, when the long-delayed 63rd Street tunnel was finally opened, its three new stations—63rd Street/
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Lexington Avenue, Roosevelt Island and 21st Street/Queensbridge—all sported 1968-designed interiors and Helvetica signage.
Siegel+Gale rebranded the MTA in 1994, replacing the two-toned M logo with the letters “MTA” rendered in perspective within a circle. “A unifying identity system embracing subways, buses, commuter trains, and bridges was needed to facilitate employment of the MetroCard, an electronic payment card that replaced tokens, transfers, and exact change,” according to partner Alan Siegel. The new logo accompanied the development and introduction of the MetroCard. The electronic farecard—first used on buses in 1994 and then extended to the entire transportation system in 1995—forced the Marketing & Communications Division to revise its signage manual once again and to expand its design guidelines beyond signage to all forms of communication. Michael Hertz Associates was hired to handle the signage manual, while the Service Identity Manual was done in-house. The latter included not only the MetroCards but stationery, maps, kiosks, booths and vehicles. Lock-ups for the new logo in combination with the existing logos for each of the MTA’s sub-units (e.g., Staten Island Railway, Bridges and Tunnels) were created using Helvetica Medium and Helvetica Medium Italic. But for printed material the typographic options were opened up to include other weights of Helvetica as well as Times Roman. Most likely, the ready availability of Helvetica and Times Roman as core fonts on PCs was the prime factor in this decision. Dull—but easy to administer.
ConclusionThe sign system that Noorda and Vignelli first proposed to the NYCTA in 1966 has proved remarkably resilient. It endures today despite a number of severe changes that make one wonder if it can even be attributed to them and Unimark anymore. Their modular system survives but only as graphic units rather than physical components. The black stripe, mistakenly created by the sign shop but then integrated into the 1970 standards manual, exists in a variety of colours and iterations. The
black-on-white colour scheme is now reversed. The coloured disks are still used—some with the original artwork—but the colours themselves have changed. Finally, Standard Medium has given way to Helvetica Medium—or more accurately to Neue Helvetica 65. Yet, not only is the Unimark DNA still in evidence but it has served as the basis for a much broader transportation system identity.
So, the answer to whether or not Helvetica is the typeface of the New York City subway system is that it is—but that it was not.
Reference: http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/the-mostly-true-story-of-helvetica-and-the-new-york-city-subway?recache=1&%C3%82%C2%B4pp=6&pp=1 [Accessed 02/01/11].
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A Colour Alphabet and the Limits of Colour CodingPaul Green-Armytage
Summary
This paper describes a series of studies designed to investigate the possible limits to the number of different colours that can be used in a colour code and the relative merits of colours and shapes for communicating information. The studies took their particular form in response to an observation by Rudolf Arnheim that an alphabet of 26 colours would be unusable. It was found that a text, with letters represented by coloured rectangles, can be read, first with the help of a key and then without. The colour alphabet, tested in competition with other alphabets made up of unfamiliar shapes and faces, was read more quickly than the others. Speed of reading was only matched with an alphabet made up of shapes that were familiar and nameable. Colours are most helpful for quick identification and for clarifying complex information, but where more than 26 distinctions must be made colours must be supplemented by shapes, typically in the form of letters and numbers.
Introduction
This paper is an elaboration, with some new material, of the paper presented at the 11th Congress of the International Colour Association (AIC) in Sydney, Australia [1]. The paper reflects an on-going interest in problems of colour coding and the ways in which colours and shapes can be used for communicating information. The main focus of the paper is on ways to determine the maximum number of different colours that can be used in a colour code without risk of confusion.
The number of different colours that can be used in a colour code will be greater for people with normal colour vision than for those without. While some reference will be made to the limitations experienced
by people with defective colour vision, the discussion will be concerned mainly with problems of colour coding for people with normal colour vision.
In the first section, some of the problems associated with colour coding are illustrated by the colours used to identify the different routes on transport maps. There are different approaches to the problem of selecting colour sets for colour codes. One approach is to work within a chosen colour space and take a series of points within that space as far apart from each other as possible. Another approach is to use colour naming as a means of generating a suitable range of colours. A benchmark for colour coding is the set of 22 colours of maximum contrast proposed by Kenneth Kelly in 1965 [2].
Next, there is an account of the series of studies that were conducted to investigate the relative ease with which a text can be read when the letters are represented by colours or by unfamiliar shapes. A key to the colours and shapes was provided. The studies took their particular form as a response to a claim by Rudolf Arnheim that an alphabet of 26 colours rather than shapes would be unusable [3]. It turned out that letters can be represented by colours and combined in a text that can be read. A surprise finding was that the colours were read more quickly than the shapes. The studies were also concerned with the palette of colours that should be used and the way that colours should be assigned to letters.
The findings from these studies led to a further study, described in the third section, to test the influence of simultaneous contrast on the ease with which colours can be identified. Simultaneous contrast comes into play on geological maps where the appearance of colours is affected by surrounding colours. Correct
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identification of colours from the key is more difficult as a result. The findings from this study led to a modification of the palette of colours used for the colour alphabet and to re-assignment of colours to letters. This modified alphabet was learned and a series of short poems were read without reference to a key. Reading time improved with practice but one or two mistakes were made with each poem. This suggests that 26 colours can be taken as a provisional limit to the number of different colours that can be used in a code. The suitability of the alphabet colours for colour coding is supported by their striking similarity to Kelly’s colours of maximum contrast.
The studies revealed the importance of simplicity and contrast where objects need to be identified quickly and easily. Provided the number of colours does not exceed 26, colours can be identified more quickly than shapes. Shapes also need to be simple and very different from each other if they are to be identified quickly. And there were two other factors, revealed by the studies, that contribute to speed and ease of identification. Shapes can be identified more quickly if they are familiar and can be named. Colours are already familiar and identification of colours is also made easier if the colours can be named.
The relative strengths and weaknesses of colours and shapes for communicating information are evident on geological maps. Without colour the maps would be almost impossible to read but colours alone are not enough. The colour patterns reveal the broad distribution of the rocks, but there are more than 26 kinds of rock to be identified. Slightly different colours may be used but the difference is too subtle. In order to establish the identity of every kind of rock each colour area is also marked by a letter-number code. Colours give quick access to the big picture; for the fine detail reliance must be placed on shapes.
Colour Sets for Colour Coding
The colours used to identify the different routes on transport maps are a familiar example of colour coding.
Transport Map ProblemWhat is the largest number of different colours that can be used to identify the different routes on a transport map without risk of confusion? Colour coding of different routes in a system of public transport can be very helpful. Consider this scenario: a traveller, arriving at Gothenburg Central Station in Sweden, has to meet a friend in suburban Kålltorp. The traveller asks how to get to Kålltorp and is told, ‘Take tram no.3, going east, to the end of the line. It is the blue route – the vivid blue, not the light blue which is route no.9.’ The Gothenburg trams have their route numbers and destinations shown on coloured panels above the drivers’ front windows. The colour on an approaching tram can be identified well before it is possible to read the number or the name of the tram’s destination. The same colours are used for the tram routes as shown on the Gothenburg transport map. Not only do the different colours identify the different routes, they also make the map easier to read.
The task of selecting colours for identifying the different routes of the Gothenburg trams was described by Lars Sivik during the 1983 meeting of the International Colour Association [4]. Sivik’s account of that task led to consideration of the criteria that should be used when choosing colours for coding purposes. It also led to speculation about the limits, in terms of the number of different colours used in a coding system, beyond which colour coding would break down.
The 1995 edition of the Gothenburg transport map shows nine tram routes [5]. The coloured route lines are presented on a grey background. The colours can be named: white, yellow, vivid blue, green, red, orange, brown, purple and light blue.
Since 1995, the tram routes have been further modified. Two new routes are shown on the map that is available online [6] and further expansion of the system is planned. The new route 10 is identified by yellow–green and route 11 by black. Colour naming could be used as a means of extending the colour code. Pink could be used for a future route 12. Light green and light purple are distinct from vivid green
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and vivid purple and could be added for future routes 13 and 14. Blue–green could be added for route 15. To make room for even further expansion it would be possible to make slight modifications to the identifying colours of established routes. Orange, brown and purple could each be split into two separate colours. Existing routes 6, 7 and 8 could now be yellow–orange, yellow–brown and red–purple which would allow for new routes 16, 17 and 18 to be identified by red–orange, red–brown and blue–purple. The past, current and possible future route colours for the Gothenburg trams are shown on the left of Figure 1 as the ‘Gothenburg Palette’.
Next to the Gothenburg Palette are the identifying colours used for other transport systems which have several established routes. The orders of the colours have been rearranged for easier comparison. The colours were matched visually to those on printed maps for the Tokyo Subway [7], the Paris Metro and RER [8,9], the London and the South East Rail Service [10] the London Underground [11] and the Oyster rail services in London [12]. The Paris RER routes are express services to the airports and outlying towns and are represented on the map by broader lines than those for the Metro. Travellers can transfer between the RER and the Metro. In London, the new Oyster card will allow travellers to transfer between the London Underground and mainline routes. The Underground routes are represented on the map by single lines, the mainline routes by double lines. The mainline routes are identified by the terminus stations which they serve and are colour coded accordingly.
The comparison in Figure 1 shows how the Tokyo route colours could be more clearly differentiated. Three routes are identified by similar reds which could be confused. Two of these could be modified to match the red–orange and red–purple of the Gothenburg Palette. Two blues that are similar are used on the Paris map for RER route B and Metro route 13. These could also be made more distinct if one were made a lighter blue, but the potential confusion is avoided because they are differentiated by shape – the route lines are shown in different
widths. Shape differentiation also overcomes several potential confusions between the colours used for the routes on the London Oyster map where single lines are used for the London Underground routes and double lines for the routes serving the mainline termini.
It might be possible to find alternative colours for the London termini so that shape differentiation were no longer necessary on the London Oyster map and all 24 routes were clearly differentiated by colour alone. The Paris Metro/RER system has some colours (for routes 3, 12 and 14) that have no clear equivalent in the Gothenburg Palette but which are still easily differentiated. This points to ways in which the range of colours could be extended in a solution to the transport map problem which might then be applied for London. A usable colour code with 24 colours might be possible. However, if the planners of the Oyster system had decided to identify the mainline routes as they are on the London and the South East Rail Services map they would have needed 19 colours for the mainline routes to be combined with the 13 well established route colours of the London Underground. Several of the Underground colours have confusable equivalents on the London and the South East Rail Services map as can be seen in Figure 1. A range of 32 colours would be needed. It seems unlikely that a solution to the transport map problem would be such a large number.Colours of maximum contrast
Identifying the different routes on a transport map is one of many possible applications for a colour code. In a more general discussion of colour coding Robert Carter and Ellen Carter discuss problems of choosing colour sets that will be most effective for communicating information in a given situation [13]. They also pose the question, ‘What is the maximum number of colours that can be used?’
In response to requests for sets of colours that would be as different from each other as possible for purposes of colour coding, Kenneth Kelly proposed a sequence of colours from which it would be possible to select up to 22 colours of maximum contrast [2].
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Kelly made use of the Inter-Society Color Council and National Bureau of Standards (ISCC-NBS) method of designating colours [14] and selected his colours from the ISCC-NBS Centroid Color Charts [15]. The colours are listed in a table together with general colour names, their ISCC-NBS Centroid numbers, their ISCC-NBS colour name abbreviations and Munsell notations. Kelly’s list, with colour samples matched visually to the ISCC-NBS centroid colours, is shown in Figure 2.
The order of colours in Kelly’s list was planned so that there would be maximum contrast between colours in a set if the required number of colours were always selected in order from the top. So a set of five colours should be white, black, yellow, purple and orange. And if seven colours were required, light blue and red should be added. Kelly took care of the needs of people with defective colour vision. The first nine colours would be maximally different for such people as well as for people with normal vision. These nine colours are also readily distinguishable by colour name. The dotted line in Figure 2 separates these from the other colours on the list.
Carter and Carter [13] make reference to Kelly’s work and verify his assumption that the ease with which two colours can be discriminated depends on how far apart the colours are in colour space. From the colour spaces available at the time they chose CIE L*u*v* as most appropriate for their study. They recognised that the key to their problem was to establish the smallest degree of difference between two colours that would still allow people to discriminate the colours with acceptable ease. They found that people’s ability to identify colours correctly diminished rapidly when the distance between colours was less than 40 CIE L*u*v* units. They provide a rough answer to their own question about the maximum number of usable colours: their Table 1 shows that colours in a set of 25 could all be separated by at least 51.6 CIE L*u*v* units.
In a later study, Carter and Carter investigated the role of colour coding for rapid location of small symbols on electronic displays [16]. They show how
ease and speed of location are influenced, in part, by the degree of difference between colours, but also by the size and luminance of the symbols in relation to the surround. In their earlier study [13], Carter and Carter propose an algorithm for establishing colour sets within CIE L*u*v* space. Building on the work of Carter and Carter, others have proposed algorithms for generating colour sets [17,18]. The ISCC set up Project Committee 54 with the intention of bringing Kelly’s work up to date [19]. However, the committee decided that, for what they were trying to do, they could not improve on Kelly’s set of colours [20]. Robert Carter and Rafael Huertas have investigated the use of other colour spaces and colour difference metrics for generating colour sets [21]. They also refer to an alternative approach, investigated by Smallman and Boynton, whereby a colour code could be based on colour name concepts.
Colour Naming and Basic Colour TermsThe concept of ‘basic colour terms’ was introduced by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in their landmark study which was published in 1969 [22]. Berlin and Kay mapped the basic terms of 20 languages on an array of 329 colours from the Munsell colour order system. They claim that ‘a total universal inventory of exactly eleven basic colour categories exists from which the eleven or fewer basic colour terms of any given language are always drawn.’ They list the basic colour terms for English as: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. Participants in their study had indicated the range of colours which they would describe by each name and also pinpointed the best, most typical example of each.
Some colour names are mapped onto a much larger range of different colours than other colour names. This means that it is possible to make additional distinctions such as that between light and vivid blue as for the Gothenburg tram colours. Further distinctions can be made by using composite names such as yellow–green and blue–green. While the difference in appearance between the colours may be the key to a successful colour code, the naming structure, as mapped by Berlin and Kay, could be
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used as a starting point. This was the approach used for the Gothenburg Palette and it is surely an advantage if the colours in a code can also be named. This is clear from the example given above of a traveller arriving in Gothenburg and needing to get to Kålltorp.
Relating Colour Names to Colour SpaceThe number of colours that can be named by the ISCC-NBS method of designating colours, as used by Kelly, is 267. This is level three of the ‘Universal Color Language’ (UCL), with its six levels of increasing precision. The UCL is published by the US Department of Commerce [14]. Munsell colour space [23] is subdivided into smaller and smaller blocks, each block containing a range of colours that are identified by the same name. The ISCC-NBS centroid colours represent the focal colours for the 267 blocks at level three. At level one, with 13 colours, the blocks are much larger and the naming of the range of colours within each block is much less precise. There are 29 colours at level two. At level four are the thousand or more colours in a colour order system such as Munsell. Interpolation between colour standards, and then the use of measuring instruments, increases the number of colours to about 500 000 at level five and 5000 000 at level six. A Munsell notation is provided for each colour in the ISCC-NBS Centroid Color Charts. The focal colours for levels one and two of the UCL, matched visually to the designated ISCC-NBS centroid colours, are shown in Figure 3. The level one colours are represented by circles, the colours added at level two are represented by diamonds. The colours are arranged approximately according to their Munsell hues and lightness values on the gird used by Berlin and Kay to record the way that colour names were mapped. The shaded areas in Figure 3 represent the range of colours that would be described by each colour name as recorded by English speaking participants in the Berlin and Kay study: white, grey, black, pink, red, orange, brown, yellow, green, blue and purple.
The 29 colours at level two of the UCL could be considered as a basis for a colour code. However,
some of the colours might be too similar for confident identification and there are also areas of colour space that are not well represented.
A simpler alternative to the first three levels of the UCL is the three-level system of Colour Zones [24,25]. The structural framework for the Zones is that of the Natural Color System (NCS) [26]. The reference points for the NCS, and for the Colour Zones, are the Elementary Colours (ürfarben) proposed by Ewald Hering: Yellow, Red, Blue, Green, White and Black [27]. These are not physical samples but ideas such as a yellow that is neither reddish, greenish, blackish nor whitish. The appearance of any colour can be described in terms of its relative resemblance to these conceptual reference points. So the ISCC-NBS centroid colour ‘Vivid Yellow Green’ would be described as 50% yellowish, 50% greenish, 10% whitish and 10% blackish. Colour Zones are subdivisions of the NCS colour space. Each zone contains a range of similar colours with a focal colour as a reference point at the centre of the zone. Hering’s Elementary Colours are the focal points for the six zones at level one. Further subdivisions provide 27 zones at level two and 165 zones at level three.
The colours from levels one and two of the Colour Zones system are shown in Figure 4. The Elementary Colours, at level one, are represented by circles and the colours added at level two by diamonds. The colour names, selected after extensive research, should be generally acceptable and can be defended. The symbols below each column of colours indicate the hue zone to which the colours belong. The symbols to the right of each row of colours indicate the nuance zone.
The 27 colours at level two of the Colour Zones system could also be used as a basis for a colour code. They were tested as part of the colour alphabet project which is described in the next section.
Reference: GREEN-ARMYTAGE, P., 2010. A colour alphabet and the limits of colour coding. [online] Available at: <http://www.colour-journal.org/2010/5/10/10510article.htm> [Accessed 29/09/10].
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A Colour Alphabet and the Limits of Colour CodingIllustrations
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Reference: GREEN-ARMYTAGE, P., 2010. A colour alphabet and the limits of colour coding. [online] Available at: <http://www.colour-journal.org/2010/5/10/10510article.htm> [Accessed 29/09/10].
Line Colour Term Cyan Value
Magenta Value
Yellow Value
Black Value
Lilac 10 70 0 0
Dark Green 100 30 100 0
Bright Blue 100 50 0 5
Chestnut 40 85 95 0
Brown 25 70 95 0
Light Brown 25 50 85 0
Orange 0 65 100 0
Lavender 55 60 0 5
Light Green 65 0 100 5
Purple 40 95 60 10
Light Green 70 5 100 0
Terracotta 0 80 100 0
Aqua 80 10 50 0
Yellow 0 15 100 0
Dark Brown 60 75 90 0
Lavender 55 60 5 0
Light Blue 80 20 5 0
Dark Blue 100 60 10 5
Light Orange 0 55 100 5
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Berlin
London
The current colours are taken from the TfL Colour Standards guide, which defines the precise colours from the Pantone palette, and also a colour naming scheme that is particular to TfL. Earlier maps were limited by the number of colours available that could be clearly distinguished in print. Improvements in colour printing technology have reduced this problem and the map has coped with the identification of new lines without great difficulty.
Line Colour TfL Colour Name PMS Reference
Bakerloo Brown Corporate Brown Pantone 470
Central Red Corporate Red Pantone 485
Circle Yellow Corporate Yellow Pantone 116
District Green Corporate Green Pantone 356
Hammersmith & City Pink Underground Pink Pantone 197
Jubilee Grey Corporate Grey Pantone 430
Metropolitan Magenta Corporate Magenta Pantone 235
Northern Black Corporate Black Pantone Black
Piccadilly Blue Corporate Blue Pantone 072
Victoria Light Blue Corporate Light Blue Pantone 299
Waterloo & City Turquoise Corporate Turquoise Pantone 338
Docklands Light Railway Turquoise (double stripe) DLR Turquoise Pantone 326
Overground Lines Orange (double stripe) Overground Orange Pantone 158
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map [Accessed 20/12/10].
106
PANTONE®
430C134R143G152B
PANTONE®
430UC: 5K: 45
PANTONE®
197C215R153G175B
PANTONE®
197UM: 45Y: 10
PANTONE®
356C0R114G41B
PANTONE®
356UC: 95Y: 100K: 27
PANTONE®
116C255R206G0B
PANTONE®
116UM: 16Y: 100
PANTONE®
485C220R36G31B
PANTONE®
485UM: 95Y:100
PANTONE®
470C137R78G36B
PANTONE®
470UM: 58Y: 100K: 33
Transport for London Corporate Colour Standards
Bakerloo Line
Central Line
Circle Line
District Line
Hammersmith & City Line
Jubilee Line
107
Elective A Supporting Material
PANTONE®
338C118R208G189B
PANTONE®
338UC: 47Y: 32
PANTONE®
299C0R160G226B
PANTONE®
299UC: 85M: 19
PANTONE®
072C0R25G168B
PANTONE®
072UC: 100M: 88K: 5
PANTONE®
Black C0R0G0B
PANTONE®
Black UK: 100
PANTONE®
235C117R16G86B
PANTONE®
235UC: 5M: 100K: 40
PANTONE®
158C232R106G16B
PANTONE®
158UM: 61Y: 97
PANTONE®
326C0R175G173B
PANTONE®
326UC: 87Y: 38
Metropolitan Line
Northern Line
Piccadilly Line
Victoria Line
Waterloo & City Line
Overground Line
DLR Line
Reference: TfL Corporate Design Standards, Colour Standards. [online] Available at: <http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/12523.aspx> [Accessed 22/12/10].
108 Line Colour Term Cyan Value
Magenta Value
Yellow Value
Black Value
Red 0 100 100 0
Dark Green 100 0 100 0
Dark Blue 100 100 0 0
Bright Blue 100 0 0 0
Brown 32 99 98 1
Orange 0 60 100 0
Purple 40 100 0 0
Yellow 0 20 100 0
Light Grey 20 0 0 20
Lime Green 40 0 100 0
Aqua 60 0 40 20
Light Blue 40 0 0 0
Light Aqua 40 0 40 0
Dissecting Metro Maps – Line Colours
Moscow
109
Elective A Supporting Material
Line Colour Term Cyan Value
Magenta Value
Yellow Value
Black Value
Red 0 89 80 0
Dark Green 100 0 90 0
Purple 39 87 0 0
Bright Blue 100 66 0 2
Orange 0 62 100 0
Lime Green 69 0 100 0
Brown 4 53 100 21
Yellow 0 17 97 0
Light Grey 42 31 30 14
Dark Grey 53 43 40 30
New York
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_nomenclature#cite_note-0 [Accessed 22/12/10].
Since 1979, each service’s colour corresponds to the line it uses in Manhattan—defined as the trunk line—with these exceptions: the IND Crosstown Line, which doesn’t carry services to Manhattan, is coloured light green; and all shuttles are coloured dark gray. Another exception is the M train which currently uses two trunk lines, the IND Sixth Avenue Line and the BMT Nassau Street Line. Since the M historically ran through the Nassau Street Line it was colored brown. Since June 27, 2010, the M has been rerouted via the Chrystie Street Connection to run on the Sixth Avenue Line, as a replacement for the V and is now colored orange. Each line colour was given a name as follows: Tomato Red, Apple Green, Raspberry, Vivid Blue, Bright Orange, Sunflower Yellow, Terracotta Brown, Light Slate Grey, Dark Slate Grey, Lime Green.
110 Line Colour Term Cyan Value
Magenta Value
Yellow Value
Black Value
Yellow 0 20 93 0
Bright Blue 87 52 0 0
Olive 30 16 82 27
Light Blue 48 0 16 0
Purple 32 80 0 0
Peach 0 54 74 0
Light Green 56 0 53 0
Pink 0 49 14 0
Light Green 56 0 53 0
Lavender 26 41 1 0
Lime Green 19 4 88 10
Dark Yellow 5 29 82 9
Brown 29 49 75 36
Green 80 9 74 16
Light Blue 48 0 16 0
Plum 76 95 0 0
Dissecting Metro Maps – Line Colours
Paris
111
Elective A Supporting Material
Line Name Colour Term Cyan Value
Magenta Value
Yellow Value
Black Value
Asakusa Line Pink 0 68 50 0
Mita Line Bright Blue 85 48 0 0
Shinjuku Line Light Green 57 1 89 1
Oedo Line Bright Pink 2 94 13 4
Ginza Line Orange 0 48 92 0
Marunouchi Line Red 0 96 89 0
Hibiya Line Light Grey 29 20 20 5
Tozai Line Light Blue 71 8 0 0
Chiyoda Line Green 79 3 79 2
Yurakucho Line Gold 3 32 93 9
Hanzomon Line Purple 55 90 0 0
Namboku Line Aqua 73 0 48 0
Fukutoshin Line Brown 9 70 83 16
Tokyo
112
Comparing Line Colours
All Lines from all 6 Metro Systems
113
Elective A Supporting Material
Lines Arranged by City & Colour Spectrum
114
Line Colours Converted to Blocks
Comparing Line Colours
115
Elective A Supporting Material
116
Introducing Additional Information
Comparing Line Colours
Berlin
Brown
Dark Brown
Red
Red-Brown
Orange
Dark Yellow
Yellow
Lime Green
Olive
Green
Dark Green
Light Turquoise
Turquoise
Light Blue
Bright Blue
Blue
Dark Blue
Lavender
Purple
Bright Pink
Pink
Light Grey
Dark Grey
Black
London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
117
Elective A Supporting Material
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
S41 LINE C40/M85/Y95/K0
U2 LINE C0/M80/Y100/K0
S5 LINE C0/M65/Y100/K0
U9 LINE C0/M55/Y100/K5
S45/S46/S47 LINE C25/M50/Y85/K0
S42 LINE C25/M70/Y95/K0
U5/U55 LINE C60/M75/Y90/K0
CENTRAL LINE C0/M95/Y100/K0
BAKERLOO LINE C0/M58/Y100/K33
LINE 5 C32/M99/Y98/K1
LINE 1 C0/M100/Y100/K0 LINE 1/2/3 C0/M89/Y80/K0
LINE J/Z C4/M53/Y100/K21
LINE 5 C0/M54/Y74/K0
LINE 11 C29/M49/Y75/K36
MARUNOUCHI LINE C0/M96/Y89/K0
FUKUTOSHIN LINE C9/M70/Y83/K16
U4 LINE C0/M15/Y100/K0
S8/S85 LINE C65/M0/Y100/K5
U1 LINE C70/M5/Y100/K0
S2/S25 LINE C100/M30/Y100/K0
OVERGROUND LINES C0/M61/Y97/K0 LINE 6 C0/M60/Y100/K0
LINE 8 C0/M20/Y100/K0
LINE B/D/F/M C0/M62/Y100/K0
LINE 1 C0/M20/Y93/K0
LINE 10 C5/M29/Y82/K9 YURAKUCHO LINE C3/M32/Y93/K9
GINZA LINE C0/M48/Y92/K0
U3 LINE C80/M10/Y50/K0
CIRCLE LINE C0/M16/Y100/K0
WATERLOO & CITY LINE C47/M0/Y32/K0
LINE 10 C40/M0/Y100/K0
LINE 2 C0/M20/Y100/K0
LINE Л2 C40/M0/Y40/K0
LINE Q/R/N C0/M17/Y97/K0
LINE 12 C80/M9/Y74/K16
LINE 6 C56/M0/Y53/K0
LINE 13 C48/M0/Y16/K0
LINE 3 C30/M16/Y82/K27
LINE 9 C19/M4/Y88/K10
SHINJUKU LINE C57/M1/Y89/K1
U7 LINE C80/M20/Y5/K0
S3 LINE C100/M50/Y0/K5
U8 LINE C100/M60/Y10/K5
DLR C87/M0/Y38/K0
DISTRICT LINE C95/M0/Y100/K27
LINE Л3 C40/M0/Y0/K0
LINE 11 C60/M0/Y40/K20
LINE 4/5/6 C100/M0/Y90/K0
LINE G C69/M0/Y100/K0
LINE 2 C87/M52/Y0/K0 MITA LINE C85/M48/Y0/K0
TOZAI LINE C71/M8/Y0/K0
NAMBOKU LINE C73/M0/Y48/K0
CHIYODA LINE C79/M3/Y79/K2
S7/S75 LINE C55/M60/Y0/K5
U6 LINE C55/M60/Y5/K0
S9 LINE C40/M95/Y60/K10
PICCADILLY LINE C100/M88/Y0/K5
VICTORIA LINE C85/M19/Y0/K0
LINE 3 C100/M100/Y0/K0
LINE 4 C100/M0/Y0/K0
LINE A/C/E C100/M66/Y0/K2
LINE 4 C32/M80/Y0/K0
LINE 7 C0/M49/Y14/K0
MITA LINE C85/M48/Y0/K0
OEDO LINE C2/M94/Y13/K4
ASAKUSA LINE C0/M68/Y50/K0
HIBIYA LINE C29/M20/Y20/K5
S1 LINE C10/M70/Y0/K0
METROPOLITAN LINE C5/M100/Y0/K40
HAMMERSMITH & CITY LINE C0/M60/Y15/K0
JUBILEE LINE C5/M0/Y0/K45
NORTHERN LINE C0/M0/Y0/K100
LINE 7 C40/M100/Y0/K0
LINE 9 C20/M0/Y0/K20
LINE 7 C39/M87/Y0/K0
LINE L C42/M31/Y30/K14
LINE S C53/M43/Y40/K30
LINE 8 C26/M41/Y1/K0
LINE 14 C76/M95/Y0/K0
HANZOMON LINE C55/M90/Y0/K0
118
Potential Output for Comparing Line Colours
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for Metro Systems
Initial Poster Iterations
119
Elective A Supporting Material
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
S41 LINE C40/M85/Y95/K0 CENTRAL LINE C0/M95/Y100/K0 LINE 1 C0/M100/Y100/K0 LINE 1/2/3 C0/M89/Y80/K0 LINE 5 C0/M54/Y74/K0 MARUNOUCHI LINE C0/M96/Y89/K0
S5 LINE C0/M65/Y100/K0 OVERGROUND LINES C0/M61/Y97/K0 LINE 6 C0/M60/Y100/K0 LINE B/D/F/M C0/M62/Y100/K0 LINE 10 C5/M29/Y82/K9 GINZA LINE C0/M48/Y92/K0
U4 LINE C0/M15/Y100/K0 CIRCLE LINE C0/M16/Y100/K0 LINE 8 C0/M20/Y100/K0 LINE Q/R/N C0/M17/Y97/K0 LINE 1 C0/M20/Y93/K0 SHINJUKU LINE C3/M32/Y93/K9
S2/S25 LINE C100/M30/Y100/K0 DISTRICT LINE C95/M0/Y100/K27 LINE 2 C100/M0/Y100/K0 LINE 4/5/6 C100/M0/Y90/K0 LINE 12 C80/M9/Y74/K16 CHIYODA LINE C79/M3/Y79/K2
U8 LINE C100/M60/Y10/K5 PICCADILLY LINE C100/M88/Y0/K5 LINE 3 C100/M100/Y0/K0 LINE A/C/E C100/M66/Y0/K2 LINE 2 C87/M52/Y0/K0 MITA LINE C85/M48/Y0/K0
S9 LINE C40/M95/Y60/K10 METROPOLITAN LINE C5/M100/Y0/K40 LINE 7 C40/M100/Y0/K0 LINE 7 C39/M87/Y0/K0 LINE 4 C32/M80/Y0/K0 HANZOMON LINE C55/M90/Y0/K0
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for Metro Systems
120
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for 6 Metro Systems
Potential Output for Comparing Line Colours
Further Poster Iterations
121
Elective A Supporting Material
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
S41 LINE C40/M85/Y95/K0 CENTRAL LINE C0/M95/Y100/K0 LINE 1 C0/M100/Y100/K0 LINE 1/2/3 C0/M89/Y80/K0 LINE 5 C0/M54/Y74/K0 MARUNOUCHI LINE C0/M96/Y89/K0
S5 LINE C0/M65/Y100/K0 OVERGROUND LINES C0/M61/Y97/K0 LINE 6 C0/M60/Y100/K0 LINE B/D/F/M C0/M62/Y100/K0 LINE 10 C5/M29/Y82/K9 GINZA LINE C0/M48/Y92/K0
U4 LINE C0/M15/Y100/K0 CIRCLE LINE C0/M16/Y100/K0 LINE 8 C0/M20/Y100/K0 LINE Q/R/N C0/M17/Y97/K0 LINE 1 C0/M20/Y93/K0 SHINJUKU LINE C3/M32/Y93/K9
S2/S25 LINE C100/M30/Y100/K0 DISTRICT LINE C95/M0/Y100/K27 LINE 2 C100/M0/Y100/K0 LINE 4/5/6 C100/M0/Y90/K0 LINE 12 C80/M9/Y74/K16 CHIYODA LINE C79/M3/Y79/K2
U8 LINE C100/M60/Y10/K5 PICCADILLY LINE C100/M88/Y0/K5 LINE 3 C100/M100/Y0/K0 LINE A/C/E C100/M66/Y0/K2 LINE 2 C87/M52/Y0/K0 MITA LINE C85/M48/Y0/K0
S9 LINE C40/M95/Y60/K10 METROPOLITAN LINE C5/M100/Y0/K40 LINE 7 C40/M100/Y0/K0 LINE 7 C39/M87/Y0/K0 LINE 4 C32/M80/Y0/K0 HANZOMON LINE C55/M90/Y0/K0
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for 6 Metro Systems
122
Potential Output for Comparing Line Colours
Further Poster Iterations
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for Six Metro Systems
S41 LINE C40/M85/Y95/K0
U2 LINE C0/M80/Y100/K0
S5 LINE C0/M65/Y100/K0
U9 LINE C0/M55/Y100/K5
S45/S46/S47 LINE C25/M50/Y85/K0
S42 LINE C25/M70/Y95/K0
U5/U55 LINE C60/M75/Y90/K0
CENTRAL LINE C0/M95/Y100/K0
BAKERLOO LINE C0/M58/Y100/K33
LINE 5 C32/M99/Y98/K1
LINE 1 C0/M100/Y100/K0 LINE 1/2/3 C0/M89/Y80/K0
LINE J/Z C4/M53/Y100/K21
LINE 5 C0/M54/Y74/K0
LINE 11 C29/M49/Y75/K36
MARUNOUCHI LINE C0/M96/Y89/K0
FUKUTOSHIN LINE C9/M70/Y83/K16
U4 LINE C0/M15/Y100/K0
S8/S85 LINE C65/M0/Y100/K5
U1 LINE C70/M5/Y100/K0
S2/S25 LINE C100/M30/Y100/K0
OVERGROUND LINES C0/M61/Y97/K0 LINE 6 C0/M60/Y100/K0
LINE 8 C0/M20/Y100/K0
LINE B/D/F/M C0/M62/Y100/K0
LINE 1 C0/M20/Y93/K0
LINE 10 C5/M29/Y82/K9 YURAKUCHO LINE C3/M32/Y93/K9
GINZA LINE C0/M48/Y92/K0
U3 LINE C80/M10/Y50/K0
CIRCLE LINE C0/M16/Y100/K0
WATERLOO & CITY LINE C47/M0/Y32/K0
LINE 10 C40/M0/Y100/K0
LINE 2 C0/M20/Y100/K0
LINE Л2 C40/M0/Y40/K0
LINE Q/R/N C0/M17/Y97/K0
LINE 12 C80/M9/Y74/K16
LINE 6 C56/M0/Y53/K0
LINE 13 C48/M0/Y16/K0
LINE 3 C30/M16/Y82/K27
LINE 9 C19/M4/Y88/K10
SHINJUKU LINE C57/M1/Y89/K1
U7 LINE C80/M20/Y5/K0
S3 LINE C100/M50/Y0/K5
U8 LINE C100/M60/Y10/K5
DLR C87/M0/Y38/K0
DISTRICT LINE C95/M0/Y100/K27
LINE Л3 C40/M0/Y0/K0
LINE 11 C60/M0/Y40/K20
LINE 4/5/6 C100/M0/Y90/K0
LINE G C69/M0/Y100/K0
LINE 2 C87/M52/Y0/K0 MITA LINE C85/M48/Y0/K0
TOZAI LINE C71/M8/Y0/K0
NAMBOKU LINE C73/M0/Y48/K0
CHIYODA LINE C79/M3/Y79/K2
S7/S75 LINE C55/M60/Y0/K5
U6 LINE C55/M60/Y5/K0
S9 LINE C40/M95/Y60/K10
PICCADILLY LINE C100/M88/Y0/K5
VICTORIA LINE C85/M19/Y0/K0
LINE 3 C100/M100/Y0/K0
LINE 4 C100/M0/Y0/K0
LINE A/C/E C100/M66/Y0/K2
LINE 4 C32/M80/Y0/K0
LINE 7 C0/M49/Y14/K0
MITA LINE C85/M48/Y0/K0
OEDO LINE C2/M94/Y13/K4
ASAKUSA LINE C0/M68/Y50/K0
HIBIYA LINE C29/M20/Y20/K5
S1 LINE C10/M70/Y0/K0
METROPOLITAN LINE C5/M100/Y0/K40
HAMMERSMITH & CITY LINE C0/M60/Y15/K0
JUBILEE LINE C5/M0/Y0/K45
NORTHERN LINE C0/M0/Y0/K100
LINE 7 C40/M100/Y0/K0
LINE 9 C20/M0/Y0/K20
LINE 7 C39/M87/Y0/K0
LINE L C42/M31/Y30/K14
LINE S C53/M43/Y40/K30
LINE 8 C26/M41/Y1/K0
LINE 14 C76/M95/Y0/K0
HANZOMON LINE C55/M90/Y0/K0
123
Elective A Supporting Material
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for Six Metro Systems
S41 LINE
U2 LINE
S5 LINE
U9 LINE
S45/S46/S47 LINE
S42 LINE
U5/U55 LINE
CENTRAL LINE
BAKERLOO LINE
LINE 5
LINE 1 LINE 1/2/3
LINE J/Z
LINE 5
LINE 11
MARUNOUCHI LINE
FUKUTOSHIN LINE
U4 LINE
S8/S85 LINE
U1 LINE
S2/S25 LINE
OVERGROUND LINES LINE 6
LINE 8
LINE B/D/F/M
LINE 1
LINE 10 YURAKUCHO LINE
GINZA LINE
U3 LINE
CIRCLE LINE
WATERLOO & CITY LINE
LINE 10
LINE 2
LINE Л2
LINE Q/R/N
LINE 12
LINE 6
LINE 13
LINE 3
LINE 9
SHINJUKU LINE
U7 LINE
S3 LINE
U8 LINE
DLR
DISTRICT LINE
LINE Л3
LINE 11
LINE 4/5/6
LINE G
LINE 2 MITA LINE
TOZAI LINE
NAMBOKU LINE
CHIYODA LINE
S7/S75 LINE
U6 LINE
S9 LINE
PICCADILLY LINE
VICTORIA LINE
LINE 3
LINE 4
LINE A/C/E
LINE 4
LINE 7
OEDO LINE
ASAKUSA LINE
HIBIYA LINE
S1 LINE
METROPOLITAN LINE
HAMMERSMITH & CITY LINE
JUBILEE LINE
NORTHERN LINE
LINE 7
LINE 9
LINE 7
LINE L
LINE S
LINE 8
LINE 14
HANZOMON LINE
124
Influences on Potential Outputs
Pantone Charts
125
Elective A Supporting Material
Reference: ANON., 2006. Mono Culture. Grafik, Issue 137, pp.11.Reference: Nat M. Waterman, 2010. Pantonorla. [online] Available at: <http://www.natitup.com/index.php?/packaging/ied-madrid/> [Accessed on 03/01/11].
126
ME
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LIN
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/ber
lin/l
ond
on
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scow
/new
yo
rk/p
aris
/to
kyo
met
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yste
ms
METROTONE
BERLINS41 LINE
LONDONCENTRAL LINE
MOSCOWLINE 1
NEW YORKLINE 1/2/3
PARISLINE 5
TOKYOMaru nouc hi LINE
C M Y K40 85 95 0
C M Y K0 95 100 0
C M Y K0 100 100 0
C M Y K0 89 80 0
C M Y K0 54 74 0
C M Y K0 96 89 0
METROTONE
BERLINS5 LINE
LONDONOVERGROUNDLINES
MOSCOWLINE 6
NEW YORKLINE B/D/F/M
PARISLINE 10
TOKYOGINZA LINE
C M Y K0 65 100 0
C M Y K0 61 97 0
C M Y K0 60 100 0
C M Y K0 62 100 0
C M Y K5 29 82 9
C M Y K0 48 92 0
Potential Output for Comparing Line Colours
127
Elective A Supporting Material
METROTONE
BERLINU4 LINE
LONDONCIRCLE LINE
MOSCOWLINE 8
NEW YORKLINE Q/R/N
PARISLINE 1
TOKYOSh in ju kuLINE
C M Y K0 15 100 0
C M Y K0 16 100 0
C M Y K0 20 100 0
C M Y K0 17 97 0
C M Y K0 20 93 0
C M Y K3 32 93 9
METROTONE
BERLINS2/S25 LINE
LONDONDISTRICT LINE
MOSCOWLINE 2
NEW YORKLINE 4/5/6
PARISLINE 12
TOKYOCh iy od aLINE
C M Y K100 30 100 0
C M Y K95 0 100 27
C M Y K100 0 100 0
C M Y K100 0 90 0
C M Y K80 9 74 16
C M Y K79 3 79 2
METROTONE
BERLINU8 LINE
LONDONPICCADILLYLINE
MOSCOWLINE 3
NEW YORKLINE A/C/E
PARISLINE 2
TOKYOMITA LINE
C M Y K100 60 10 5
C M Y K100 88 0 5
C M Y K100 100 0 0
C M Y K100 66 0 2
C M Y K87 52 0 0
C M Y K85 48 0 0
METROTONE
BERLINS9 LINE
LONDONMETROPOLITAN LINE
MOSCOWLINE 7
NEW YORKLINE 7
PARISLINE 4
TOKYOHa nz omonLINE
C M Y K40 95 60 10
C M Y K5 100 0 40
C M Y K40 100 0 0
C M Y K39 87 0 0
C M Y K32 80 0 0
C M Y K55 90 0 0
128
Potential Output for Comparing Line Colours
Metrotone Line Colour Guide
129
Elective A Supporting Material
Cover Colour Comparison
Red, Orange and Yellow Lines Green, Blue & Purple Lines
130
Artwork Refinement
process colours
First EditionFirst Printing
The METROTONE LINE COLOUR GUIDE allows for the comparison of line colours across six metro systems: Berlin, London, Moscow, New York, Paris and Tokyo. It can be used to compare equivalent colours across networks and also shows the level of differentiation between line colours within the same network.
Guide Features•6 comparable colours for each
of the 6 networks, arranged chromatically.
•A CMYK breakdown of all the colours for reference.
•L ine names and/or numbers.
Differentiation and perception of colour is paramount in information design that uses colour coding to aid communication and understanding. This guide is in part a response to a paper by Paul Green-Armytage, entitled A Colour Alphabet and the Limits of Colour Coding. It examines the maximum number of different colours it is possible to use in one scheme of colour coding before colours become difficult to distinguish.
It directly relates this problem to transport maps, such as the ones for the London Underground and Paris Metro. Many networks are expanding, often with the addition of new lines, these must be designated a colour and sit within an existing palette. The Gothenburg palette, used for the city’s tram system is cited as one of the best examples of colour contrast on a transport map, as this was given consideration during the design process.
ReferencesGREEN-ARMYTAGE, P., 2010. A colour alphabet and the limits of colour coding. [online] Available at: <http://www.colour-journal.org/2010/5/10/10510article.htm> [Accessed 29/09/10]
Metrotone was created as part of MA GD Unit 2.3, Elective A - Information Design.ISBN 978-1-590650-62-2
METROTONE®
LINE COLOUR GUIDE
ME
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LIN
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lin/l
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mo
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BERLINS41 LINE
LONDONCENTRAL LINE
MOSCOWLINE 1
NEW YORKLINE 1/2/3
PARISLINE 5
TOKYOMaru no uc hi LINE
BERLINS5 LINE
LONDONOVERGROUNDLINES
MOSCOWLINE 6
NEW YORKLINE B/D/F/M
PARISLINE 10
TOKYOGINZA LINE
CM YK40 85 95 0
CM YK09 51 00 0
CM YK01 00 1000
CM YK08 98 00
CM YK05 47 40
CM YK09 68 90
CM YK06 51 00 0
CM YK06 19 70
CM YK06 01 00 0
CM YK06 21 00 0
CM YK52 98 29
CM YK04 89 20
METROTONE METROTONE
BERLINU4 LINE
LONDONCIRCLE LINE
MOSCOWLINE 8
NEW YORKLINE Q/R/N
PARISLINE 1
TOKYOSh in ju kuLINE
CM YK01 51 00 0
CM YK01 61 00 0
CM YK02 01 00 0
CM YK01 79 70
CM YK02 09 30
CM YK33 29 39
METROTONE
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Elective A Supporting Material
METROTONE
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BERLINS2/S25 LINE
LONDONDISTRICT LINE
MOSCOWLINE 2
NEW YORKLINE 4/5/6
PARISLINE 12
TOKYOCh iy o daLINE
BERLINU8 LINE
LONDONPICCADILLYLINE
MOSCOWLINE 3
NEW YORKLINE A/C/E
PARISLINE 2
TOKYOMITA LINE
BERLINS9 LINE
LONDONMETROPOLITAN LINE
MOSCOWLINE 7
NEW YORKLINE 7
PARISLINE 4
TOKYOHanzo mo nLINE
C M Y K100 30 100 0
C M Y K95 0 100 27
C M Y K100 0 100 0
C M Y K100 0 90 0
C M Y K80 9 74 16
C M Y K79 3 79 2
C M Y K100 60 10 5
C M Y K100 88 0 5
C M Y K100 100 0 0
C M Y K100 66 0 2
C M Y K87 52 0 0
C M Y K85 48 0 0
C M Y K40 95 60 10
C M Y K5 100 0 40
C M Y K40 100 0 0
C M Y K39 87 0 0
C M Y K32 80 0 0
C M Y K55 90 0 0
METROTONE METROTONE METROTONE
ISBN 978-159065062-2
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Additional Output
Metrotone Line Colour Guide
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Elective A Supporting Material
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Metrotone Line Colour Guide
Additional Output
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Elective A Supporting Material
Berlin London Moscow New York Paris Tokyo
Metro ColoursA Comparison of Line Colours for Six Metro Systems
Final Output
Final Poster
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Final Output
Final Poster
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Elective A Supporting Material
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Critical Reflection
A Brief Evaluation of Unit 2.1 Elective A Information Design
Initially I struggled to find a data set that I was happy with and could use to present interesting information about the six metro systems listed in the brief. In the workshops for the Elective I had looked at comparing suicide rates across each system. I quickly discovered that data for this subject was difficult, and in some cases impossible to find. It seems that it is not often made public due to the sensitive nature of the information. I also found it difficult to find six parameters on this subject that could be related to the metro systems.
As part of the background research for the Elective I had collected the current versions of the maps for each subway system. Although there were many commonalities: they were all schematic diagrams apart from New York, there was a great variety in how each system represented stations, interchanges and how much additional information was included on the map.
During research for my Major Project Proposal I came across a paper entitled: A Colour Alphabet and the Limits of Colour Coding, written by Paul Green-Armytage that had been presented at the 11th Congress of the International Colour Association (AIC) in Australia and had been published in the journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, Colour: Design & Creativity. The article addressed the question of what is the maximum number of colours that can be used in a colour-coding scheme before it is difficult to distinguish between them? It specifically referred to the use of colour coding in transport maps and analysed the palettes of several networks including London and Paris. The Gothenburg tram system was cited as an example of best practise for creating a colour-coding scheme with maximum distinction.
This provided me with an avenue to research and develop the aspects of comparison for the metro systems. I took different parts of the graphic language of the maps to compare: the logo of the system, the dominant typeface used, the way stations, interchanges and termini were represented, what other symbols were used on the map, the way the lines were drawn and the colour of the lines.
I dissected each system map and broke it down into its different elements to allow for comparison. After creating a typology for each component I found the analysis of the lines and colours the most interesting and visually inspiring. This route also allowed me to further explore ideas that I was researching for the Major Project Proposal and Design and Rhetoric. Paul Green-Armytage’s paper had raised some interesting points about the nature of colour coding and the importance of colour perception and distinction in colour coding schemes. This is a particular issue for transport schemes that use colour as a central feature of their maps because if, as they grow they create additional lines, suitable colours must be added that will sit comfortably within the existing colour palette.
To look at this in relation to the comparison outlined in the brief I noted the CMYK breakdown for the colour of each line on the maps to get an accurate sample of the colour used. I was also able to obtain PMS references for all the colours used by Transport for London as this information is freely available on their website. However this information was not obtainable for the other maps so I resorted back to the CMYK references for all of the networks to maintain consistency.
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Elective A Supporting Material
I collated all the lines and colours and put them into a sequence, approximately following that of the colour spectrum. There were of course some exceptions that will never fit well into a linear arrangement, such as black and shades of brown and grey. However after some consideration I found an order which visually worked well. I then created a block of each colour and arranged them into a grid that allowed comparison by hue and by metro system. This became the basis for my poster iterations.
I began with a version that included all of the colours as they had been arranged in the blocks. I then took six colours, which were based on basic, abstract, (apart from orange) colour terms, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, what are often referred to as primary and secondary colours and compared those in a layout.
The result was quite dense and didn’t have the same level of dynamism, even after some minor adjustments. After receiving feedback via the blog I decided to continue to refine the first poster, which included all of the colours. Although this amounted to a comparison of far more than six things, it still met the requirements of the brief as six was only stated as a minimum.
Alongside of this development work I was researching Pantone for Unit 2.3 Design and Rhetoric so as an additional output I decided to represent the comparison of the six line colours as a Pantone chart. After feedback and reviewing it against the brief I decided not to submit it as my main output for the elective as it was too stylised to be viewed as objective information design. So instead I am
submitting it as a secondary, additional output for comparing the line colours as it is quite a useful, functional tool for doing so and a reflection of the relationship between my work in this elective and Design and Rhetoric.
I had planned to submit a poster with no references to the lines and colour breakdown. However it was a useful feature to have on the Metrotone chart so I created a version of the poster which included this text in the corner of each block of colour.
The resulting iteration led to a dilemma, as although the poster was less visually striking, the information was potentially interesting. The feedback I got about the posters was split evenly between the two and I found it difficult to find a rationale for choosing which option to submit as the final output. I created a further iteration of the poster as a response to feedback on the blog, in an attempt to come to a resolution, but it was less successful. After consulting the brief and reviewing both posters and my research I decided to submit the poster without the text. My reasoning for this was several-fold, firstly that the CMYK breakdown would only likely, be appreciated by designers and printers. Secondly, although the line name/number reference may have been useful to include, it interrupted the visual aspect of the design and reduced the impact of the colours. Finally, and most importantly, I wanted the poster to be about the hues themselves, a comparison of the colours as pure chroma. By presenting them in this way it draws attention to the issues of colour range, distinction and perception, common to all colour coded transport maps.
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Bibliography
Weblinks
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