Design: Vignelli exhibition, Rochester, NY. Transportation Design

View of the "Design: Vignelli" exhibition, Benetton Galleries, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States. The "Design: Vignelli" exhibition opened in 2010 at the Vignelli Center for Design Studies, which is also home to their entire professional archives. The exhibition mirrors the "Design: Vignelli" exhibition which toured nine countries between 1989-1993. As with the previous iteration, Lella Vignelli and Massimo Vignelli designed the displays, wrote the descriptive text, and curated the artifacts for the exhibition. It is the last exhibition designed by the Vignellis that is still open to the public. Pictured: NYC Subway signage (1966) and Washington DC Metro signage (1968)

Text from design: Vignelli exhibition label:
Transportation Graphics
Despite the horrors of the bureaucratic process involved in the development of a transportation design program, it is highly rewarding to design a better graphic system affecting millions of people daily. This is why we have been involved with such projects as the New York Subway and the Washington Metro. To design transportation graphics means mostly to convey the information at the point of decision –– never before, never after. How the information is conveyed is a matter of interpretation, but even then there are quite precise rules for legibility, distance, and size of type.

Our project for the New York Subway was based on a series of modular elements carrying different hierarchies of information, assembled at the point of decision to form the appropriate message. Although the implementation suffered the damages of other inputs, it is still in use. The map is based on a 45- and 90-degree structure, which alters the geography but clearly expresses the directions of the different lines. The map information was supported by the geographic map, a neighborhood map, and a verbal map providing information with words rather than images. No one could provide all these different levels of information; but since half of the population is visually-oriented and the other half verbally-oriented, perhaps the perfect solution will never exist.