out and sold within the country and outside of the country, and in turn the more produce going out to other countries means a greater sense of connection and the need to communicate and understand one another. As well as this the typeface was meant to represent the machines and technologies of the factory as they where like the font functional, geometric and uninfluenced.
‘The decade of the select 1960’s became the time… designers were concerned with ever-lasting values such as permanence, structure, timelessness and the quest for purest form possible’ Remington, R. Roger Bodenstedt, L. (2003) American Modernism, Graphic Design 1920 to 1960’, London, Laurence King. pp 162, describes the style adopted by Massimo Vignelli, you could argue that these designers wanted their work to be at its purest form, which was organized structured and legible, suggests that they wanted their work to be understood by wide audience and therefore they wanted to communicate to as many as they could, pushing towards a style everyone could understand and so this could of even been on an international basis. The argument also suggests that the use of a grid and structure was important to the understanding of a piece. ‘Semantics in design means to be understand the subject to the sender and the receiver in such a way that it makes sense to both.’ Vignelli, M. (2010) ‘The Vignelli Canon’. Mulgrave, Victoria, Images Publishing. pp9, alongside the next argument ‘ Syntactic consistency is paramount of importance in graphic design… Grids are one of the several tools helping designers to achieve syntactical consistency in graphic design.’ Vignelli, M. (2010) ‘The Vignelli Canon’. Mulgrave, Victoria, Images Publishing. pp10. Makes for a strong case that Massimo Vignelli’s Underground Map was designed with the purpose to be understood by a mass amount of people. In 1972 Massimo Vignelli’s new map for the first time showed the underground of New York. He showed the geographic location of the city above. Drawn as shapes. Massimo Vignelli used a grid 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, w