![]() ![]() Graphic designers turned it into something approaching an object of worship. The Vignelli map never really went away, though. That bothered a lot of people (even though the London map has always done the same thing) and so the map was replaced, in 1979, by a subway map that more accurately reflected the geography at street level, but which is actually harder to navigate. But in the quest to make the subway lines simple and clear, it distorted the shape of the city above, turning Central Park, for example, into a square. ![]() The Vignelli map wasn’t radical-it owed a great deal to the famous London Underground map of 1933 by Henry Beck, an updated version of which is still in use. On Vignelli’s map, subway lines were enticing ribbons of color that ran straight up, straight down, or at a perfect forty-five degree diagonal. In fact, it was more than beautiful: it was a nearly canonical piece of abstract graphic design, the work of the celebrated modernist designer Massimo Vignelli, who decided that the only way to make the spaghetti tangle of subway lines comprehensible on paper was to straighten them out. For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.
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