Subway Style
What you’re looking at above are excerpts from the 1970 Graphic manual for the NYCTA put together by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda.
There are 468 subway stations in New York City. Well, 421 if you count stations connected by a transfer as a single station, but the point is there are a lot. Each of them is filled with signs. Signs on the street, signs on the platform, mezzanine, trains - there could easily be over a million system-wide. The influence of this humble manual can not be overstated.
That’s not Helvetica, by the way: it’s Akzidenz-Grotesk.
More on the story of the Subway’s typography here from the AIGA. The full photoset of the graphics manual is available on flickr.
Source: fawny via Daring Fireball. H/T to: inalonelyplace.tumblr.com
