New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual (Unimark International, 1970)

Unimark International produced this manual for the New York City Transit Authority, and the Authority published it in 1970. The subway it addresses had been built as three separate systems, and the signs showed it: tile mosaics, enamel plates and hand-painted lettering laid down by different people in different decades. The manual replaces that accumulation with a grid, a short list of colours, one typeface family and a fixed set of arrow and route-bullet shapes. For each of them it says where it belongs on a wall, a pillar or a turnstile.

Much of the binder is spacing and alignment: how far a bullet sits from the edge of a sign, how a station name is set against the arrow beside it. Those instructions are the point, because a system with hundreds of stations and many hands can only look like one thing if the small decisions are made once. Platforms were converted over a long stretch of years after publication, one renovation and one replaced sign at a time. A rider who follows a coloured circle to the right train is reading the result.