NEW YORK — First, a confession. Whenever I write about a design project, there’s a risk that I’ll make it sound simpler than it really was. I’m not the only culprit; most other critics do it too. You know the script. A problem arises. A dynamic designer is called in to solve it. He or (occasionally) she analyzes the problem, identifies a solution and implements it. Hey presto! Job done.
There are reasons for this simplification. I have space for only so many words in a column, generally too few to explain everything in muchdetail, and too much detail can be confusing. And there may be a natural tendency, doubtless exaggerated in those who choose to write about something as inherently controlling as design, to tidy things up.
But design projects are rarely tidy; they’re much likelier to be muddled, chaotic, and to be determined by flukes, gaffes and compromises as much as forethought. It’s always refreshing to come across an unexpurgated account of the messy reality, and the American design historian Paul Shaw has produced a particularly thoughtful and engaging example in his new book,“Helvetica and the New York City Subway System” (MIT Press).
If ever a typeface was destined to symbolize a city, it isHelvetica and New York. Like other great New Yorkers, Helvetica came from somewhere else: the small Swiss town of Münchenstein, where it was developed inthe mid-1950s by an obscure designer, Max Miedinger, for the Haas Type Foundry. True to émigré tradition, it dumped its original name — Neue Haas Grotesk whenit arrived in the United States, in favor of one easier for Americans to pronounce.
The makeover worked. Helvetica flourished in America, becoming the typeface of choice for 1960s designers who wanted their work to look modern. Among them were Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, who chose Helvetica as the typeface for New York’s subway signs when they redesigned them in the late1960s. You can still see it on the latter-day version of their scheme: the thousands of signs on New York’s subway trains, stations and platforms.
It looks so comfortable there, not just because it is familiar, but because its character mirrors the city’s. Helvetica is simple in shape with no decorative details;like New Yorkers it is tough, blunt and pragmatic.
Hey presto! Except that the story isn’t quite so straightforward, as Mr. Shaw explains. Helvetica did not become ubiquitous in the New York subway system until the 1990s. Before that, efforts to introduce it were stymied by a soap-operatic cacophony of budget cuts, transit strikes, shoddy production and feeble management. Helvetica wasn’t the only casualty. As Mr. Shaw explains in his foreword, the history of the subway system had been an unrelenting “struggle between centripetal and centrifugal forces,” starting in 1904 with its first line, the Interborough Rapid Transit’s route from City Hall to the Bronx. Another company was brought in to build the second line, and a third for the next one. By the time the three lines were merged in 1940, the system was hopelessly fragmented.
This chaos was reflected in subway signs, which included the IRT’s original mosaic station names and a motley assortment of enameled, glazed and hand-painted signs indifferent colors, formats and typefaces. The title of a 1957 proposal to redesign the system said it all: “Out of the Labyrinth: A plea and a plan for improved passenger information in the New York subways.”
The key to the success of any information design program is clarity, especially so for a subway system. Passengers, including out-of-towners, rely on its signs to guide them around a vast, often tangled network of underground tunnels, in which they have no other means of identifying where they are. They often need to read them quickly, distracted by crowds of passengers and noisy trains.
Throughout the 20th century, designers developed ways to solve this problem using visual tools such as color-coding, pictograms and type. The exemplars were the London Underground’s 1930s system, and Mr. Noorda’s early1960s signs for the Milan Metro, which used a bespoke version of Helvetica.
In 1966, Mr. Noorda was invited to work with Mr. Vignelli and the Unimark design group on a review of New York subway signage. They then watched in horror as the Bergen Street Sign Shop, which made the signs, proceeded to implement some of their recommendations, misinterpret the majority of them and ignore others. Still reeling from a transit strike earlier that year, the city’s cash-strapped transit authority refused to allow Unimark to oversee the process.
Eventually the authority relented and commissioned Unimark to produce a comprehensive design scheme, many elements of which still survive. Even then, the process was botched. Unimark was dissatisfied with the Bergen Street shop’s workmanship, but the transit authority refused to consider alternatives. The choice of typeface was restricted to ones already used by the shop, which did not includeHelvetica. Unimark had to settle for the similar but less refined StandardMedium. And the transit authority could never afford to commission enough signs, creating a confusing muddle of old and new.
Yet another version of the Unimark scheme was unveiled in the late 1970s, only to encounter similar problems. It was not until 1989 that Helvetica finally became the subway’s official typeface.
Helvetica has since become one of New York’s most visible symbols, although its conquest of the subway still isn’t quite complete. Mr. Shaw detects a distracting new threat from digital signs, and an old one from the “temporary” signs written by station staff. Though there are welcome distractions, too, in the lovely old mosaic station signs that have somehow survived decades of design chaos.
Source: The New York Times (Alice Rawsthorn) - 4/3/11
