Reissue of the NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual | New York (USA) | By Lee Fleming

There are certain things you’d expect to find in an office locker, old gym clothes, discarded stationary but for Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth the discovery of the New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual proved to be a rare and unusual find. In 1970, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) hired Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, designers at Chicago-based international design firm Unimark International, to devise an extensive programme that would create a coordinated and effective rapid-transit signage system. The 274-page Standards Manual created by Vignelli and Noorda still informs the signage made today for the New York Subway and shows how a strictly minimal system could adapt to New York’s complex subway maze.

After stumbling across the rare copy of typographic history in the basement of their New York office in 2012, Reed and Smyth (both designers at Pentagram), created a dedicated website compiling scanned pages of the manual to preserve its typographic history. Two years later, the design duo gained the rights from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to reissue the manual. This entailed a kickstarter campaign to fund the project as no publisher could deliver the desired size specification- the reissue’s dimensions are 13.5” W × 13.5" H (343 x 343 mm) and every page is printed only on the right-hand page of the book to be consistent with the single-sided format of the ring-binder original. In addition, the reissue includes an introduction from Vignelli’s protégé and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut plus an essay from Christopher Bonanos, the author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid. The reissue cover, introduction and essay headings will be set in a customised version of Standard Medium by typography designer Nick Sherman who painstakingly recreated the font from photographs posted on the Standards Manual.

To read more about the Standards Manual visit their website.