id in his piece and this was kept visible in the final piece, as the above quote says a grid is essential into keeping everything around it standardized and orderly, it can help to organize information in a way that is clear and concise, and therefore understandable. The grid on the map also helps to locate certain areas, without the need to be completely understandable in another language. ‘Out with the complicated tangle of geographically accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was represented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot.’ Boyd. C, (2007) New York Subway Map (1972) Available at: http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=266 [Accessed on: 11 January 2013]
And so the grid also helps to organize the coloured lines on the page that again are concise and structured. They are straight and only turn at 90 or 45-degree angles, which means the piece, is very geometrical, like Herbert Bayer’s universal typeface. Its geometry was meant to be easier to understand, it was uniform and utopian. The lines on the Underground map can be followed easily as they are so structured; the colours help to guide your eyes around the many different subways. The small black lines indicate the stops and the number of stops on a subway line, and so if you knew you had to get of at a certain stop number you would be able to count them, the fact that each of the coloured lines has these small black lines means it is clear that they are stops and you wouldn’t need to be able to read English to be able to understand this. This new map works on semiotics. The symbol is coloured line that goes around the page, on the line there are smaller black lines, they are a sign for the subway line, where it goes and where it stops. Before this map the underground map was confusing it wasn’t structured there wasn’t a colour guide and barely any one could understand it. Even the type on the map is understandable, its Helvetica a later version of Aksidenz Grotesk, which was designed around the same time as Universal, although it contains capitals the font is still geometric and sans-serif, it doesn’t indicate a social or historical background just as Universal doesn’t, and it is easy to read. The underground map itself also does this as all the illustrations are shapes and colours there is no suggestion of a social or historical influence, this in turn means that this map was meant to be understand not just by the people who lived in New York, but commuters and more likely business people from other countries, as at the turn of the centaury industrialization had encouraged big business and trade and so by now countries all over the world where trading and communicating. People where travelling all over the world for business and so there was a need for design to be understood by a global audience, and so this is a drive towards internationalism.
‘Neue Grafik was a shiny, white-covered, near square- format quarterly… Text and captions, in monotype grotesque in German, English and French, are arranged in four columns’. Hollis, R. (2006) ‘Swiss Graphic Design: the origins and growth of an international style 1920-1965’. London, Laurence King. pp 206. Neue Grafik in translation, New Graphic Design was published August 1958; the cover designer was Carlo Vivarelli. The cover displays three different languages, a clear indication of a push towards internationalism, and a need to communicate between at least three countries, but it could include any country that spoke any of the three languages, meaning Neue Grafik had a larger audience than just England, Germany, and France. As well as this these languages where probably the most popular and used at the time and they will have all been developing countries in the modern world. And so the publication really did have a widespread audience. However unlike the other two examples of internationalism, this piece has a more focused audience, graphic designers. Although, its aim is to educate designers into designing in an ‘international 