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New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standard Manual
Compact Edition

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Compact edition reissue of the 1970 New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, by Unimark's Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda.

Excerpt from the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual Full-size Reissue:

"Massimo Vignelli used to speak of entropy, that inescapable scientific principle that dictates that systems fall apart, that extremes revert to the mean, that every rare instance of excellence is doomed to succumb to the average. I think he would have guessed that the same would happen to his subway signs: more compromises would be made, more mistakes would be enshrined as law, and the whole system would eventually slump back into a new version of the chaos which it had replaced. Yet something amazing happened. The system endured.

It endured, I think, for one reason: the document you hold in your hand. The New York subway, despite its daunting complexity, is a finite system. That means that standards manual that Massimo Vignelli, his partner Bob Noorda and their colleagues at Unimark created to control the appearance of its signs are that Holy Grail of design solutions, a Theory of Everything."

Published by Standards Manual, LLC.
10 × 10" / 
352 pages / Case-bound / Silkscreened cover and spine Italian cloth wrapped.