Thursday, May 01, 2008

in defense of my former stomping grounds

There's an item in the NYT's City Room blog about the 1972 New York City subway map by Massimo Vignelli, which is going to make a special updated appearance in this month's issue of Men's Vogue.

I love, love, love that map. It has since been replaced with more geographically-accurate versions because people were too confused by its abstractness, which I don't really get. Like the City Room writer notes, the map for the Tube has been abstract for a while, and Londoners don't seem to have any problems with it. Same goes for the Paris and Tokyo maps, to name a couple, and the DC metro map, which the writer just had to knock as "Playskool." Heh, sorry for having a map that actually easy to read. Buster Bluth could design a better subway map than your current noodle-like monstrosity, and he thought that the blue on the map was land even after $80,000 worth of cartography lessons. Oh, snap.

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