On Wayfinding and Subway Diagrams

Imagine a world without maps, subway diagrams, or highway signs.  How would people orient themselves or navigate from place to place? People often take these guides for granted, but someone had to construct these information systems and that person was more than likely a designer. Environmental graphic design is a discipline that focuses on wayfinding or the process of using spatial and environmental information to navigate to a destination. Another term for wayfinding is experiential or environmental graphic design. The Society For Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) describes wayfinding as, “the orchestration of typography, color, imagery, form, technology and, especially, content to create environments that communicate” .  These are the forms of design that are often overlooked as works of art, but have been through a huge shift in the last hundred years.

The first significant contribution to wayfinding in the early 20^th century was Harry Beck’s 1933 map of the London Underground. Beck was an engineering draftsman for the London Underground Signals Office who created the map in his free time. Prior to Beck’s reimagining, "every station was spaced to geographic scale, resulting in a cluster of dots around central London, with just a sprinkling near the city’s outskirts. Interchanges weren't clearly rendered, and every tube line was represented with a curve showing its true path” (Toor). Beck took it upon himself to simplify the design by replacing the curved lines with straight lines, verticals, horizontals, and forty-five degree angles. He also altered the scale by placing stations equidistantly and removed the superimposed above ground street grid. The result was a, “sparse, circuit board-like design that eschewed geographic accuracy for legibility” (Toor). The 1933 map was revolutionary; it inspired many imitations around the world and is still largely retained to this day.

Massimo Vignelli was one designer that drew inspiration from Harry Beck’s reimagining of London’s Underground. Vignelli was an Italian designer who had immigrated to the United States in 1965 to set up a New York design studio, Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Leila. In 1972 Vignelli was commissioned to design a map of the New York subway system for the M.T.A.  He was a modernist who, like Beck, “sacrificed geographical accuracy for clarity by reinterpreting New York’s tangled labyrinth of subway lines as a neat diagram.” (Rawsthorn). Vignelli also employed a system of dots linked by color-coded routes at 45 or 90-degree angles. However, there were differences in Vignelli’s approach as he did indicate some geographic locations, such as Central Park. Yet, “Beck’s design was [still] gentler in style, particularly in its choice of typography, [because] Mr. Vignelli used the searingly modern font Helvetica” (Rawsthorn). Designers loved the Italian’s interpretation, but New Yorker’s did not feel the same way. Many people found Vignelli’s map confusing; many stations appeared to sit out of place and the water surrounding the city was colored beige instead of blue. Part of the issue was that the M.T.A. had only implemented one of four maps that the designer had proposed. Vignelli had intended that there be geographic maps in the stations to pair with his diagram, and this lack of synchronization was likely the reason that the M.T.A. issued a new map in 1979 (Rawsthorn).  

These two very modernist approaches to map making revolutionized subway diagrams. Though their work is often overlooked by the general public, the impact it's had cannot be. 

Rawsthorn, Alice. "The Subway Map That Rattled New Yorkers." The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Aug. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/arts/design/the-subway-map-that-rattled-new-yorkers.html?_r=0>.

Toor, Amar. "Meet Harry Beck, the Genius behind London's Iconic Subway Map." The Verge. The Verge, 29 Mar. 2013. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/29/4160028/harry-beck-designer-of-iconic-london-underground-map>.