What Massimo Vignelli’s failed 1972 subway map can still teach us

6 min readSep 27, 2019

The failure of Massimo Vignell’s 1972 map for the New York subway has been widely discussed and in my view, largely misunderstood. Typically, the discussion focused on the choice between Vignelli’s ‘disciplined’ vs. a more ‘organic’ approach, or between his ‘clarity’ as opposed to ‘geographical accuracy’.

I think Vignelli’s map failed for other reasons:

the map diverged from its users’ mental map of their city on key points
its innovative color scheme damaged the map’s readability while creating no benefit

A caveat: to my knowledge, the actual user experience of the map — what New Yorkers experienced as they tried to use it, and what went wrong or right — was never properly documented and remains unknown. So my views here are based on Vignelli’s own statements, published expert opinions and my own work as a user experience expert.

The maps in users’ minds

‘Mental map’ (5),’Cognitive map’ (9) or ‘cognitive collage’ (10) are terms used to describe inhabitants’ mental model of a place: the collection of a few key spatial and physical features that form a shorthand version they use to navigate. The readability of a diagrammatic map depends on how well it matches this mental model. In a highly simplified map like the subway diagram, the match with the mental model is critically important. Precisely because the model consists of only a few features derived from users’ experience of a city, these play an outsized role in navigation and must be reflected with great accuracy in the map.

The treatment of Central Park and surrounding area is a good example of a violation of the users’ mental model. The park’s shape was altered from a rectangle to a square, which causes the orientation of the landmarks (including subway stops) around it to give an inaccurate impression of their position in relation to the park (2). This badly skews the image of a city that itself is shaped by an extremely regular geometric grid, and in which subway stops and intersections easily themselves become landmarks and nodes in the mental map of its inhabitants. The rectangular shape of the park is a core landmark.

Misunderstanding Henry Beck’s London Underground map

Vignelli and many commentators remarked that the approach had worked perfectly for decades in other cities, and practically all of them reference Henry Beck’s London Underground map of 1931. It introduced the ‘map as diagram’ approach now virtually standard for subway maps throughout the world. However, they misunderstood Beck’s approach. In an interview (1) Concietta Bencivenga (director, New York Transit Museum) stated that Beck’s map was ‘divorced of anything… that has to do with what’s going on above ground’. This is wrong. It has everything to do with what’s going on above ground.

Beck’s map worked in large part because of the superior handling of redundancy. Simply put: redundant visual information is information that when eliminated, has no impact on the users’ ability to correctly interpret what they’re seeing. (8) Removal of redundant elements is more than visual streamlining — it involves first and foremost an understanding of what can and can’t be removed without losing recognisability.

Beck was an engineering draftsman whose job was primarily to draw schematics for the electrical system. A good wiring diagram requires masterful handling of redundancy. Like none other, his specialisation taught how to map a network to an object, taking liberties with the spatial form of the network itself to make it transparent, while leaving precisely the features of the machine or facility that are essential to recognise the real-world thing the wires are part of.

This enabled Beck to stylise London in a way that exactly matches the cognitive map of the residents — the river as divider, the center expanded, and the outer lines shrunk. This is in fact the mental map residents have of the city with its two banks, walkable inner city and outer rail suburbs. With this in place, he proceeded to render the network itself. In his talk at Sussex University (7), psychologist Maxwell Roberts shows how Beck used his graphic abilities to achieve a tremendous reduction of cognitive and visual load. But this all only works, because, in Roberts’ words: “Beck’s early map … actually doesn’t distort the shape of London much at all… It wasn’t so distorted that it upset people by conflicting with their expectations of the shape of London.”

Vignelli imitated Beck’s visual styling of the network without understanding this more fundamental principle. The result is beautiful rendering of network lines that is useless as a map. Perversely, he concludes that he should have left more out: “I should have done blank [background], it would have been better. … No suggestion of geography whatsoever.” I think that would have made the map even less readable.

Colour conventions

The color scheme in Vignelli’s map departs from convention (blue for water, green for features like parks, etc.) However, there was no benefit in making the colours of land (white and gray) and water (beige) so similar in this map. It makes it muddy and poorly readable, undermining what should have been an effortless overview (this is sometimes called ‘pre-attentive’ — you understand it quicker than you can think about it). In my opinion, this alone undermined much of the map’s usability.

What can we learn?

Even with intimate knowledge of cognitive aspects of information design, and mastery of the visual craft, there is only one way to know whether any fatal flaws are hiding in the design: test it rigorously with real users.

With all respect to Vignelli, his comments (11)about the map reveal a terrible attitude, arrogant and disrespectful of the lived experience of the users of his work, and shockingly ignorant of basic cognitive principles, as evidenced by his statement that 50% of humanity is ‘visually oriented’ people who ‘have no problem reading any kind of map’, and 50% verbally oriented ‘who can never read a map’. The plan to display other maps along with the diagram is no solution at all — this would be burdensome for users. A good subway map should be readable on its own.

I’m writing this because I still encounter many colleagues who treat information design as a mainly aesthetic problem. So I’ll close with a plea to start looking through a more cognitive lens:

Ask yourself: do you understand the mental model of the users? If users have to exert conscious effort to recognise their mental model in a graphic composition, it’s bad.
When removing redundant elements, ensure that what remains matches a users’ mental model.
Innovate — depart from a well-established convention — only if there is an overwhelming potential benefit.
Learn basics of cognitive ergonomics, and test prototypes! Otherwise you risk making bad maps that only designers love.

References

1. Cheddar Explains, Interview in video ‘Why New Yorkers Insisted On a “Worse” Subway Map — Cheddar Explains’, YouTube, seen 22 September 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdDsV19DBCU, 0:23

2. Dorn, Lori (2018) Why New Yorkers Preferred a Less Attractive But Properly Scaled Subway Map Over a Modern Redesign. Seen 22 September 2019, https://laughingsquid.com/why-new-yorkers-preferred-properly-scaled-subway-map/

Note: the article includes a small video by Cheddar which highlights this.

3. Konovalov, Constantine (2017) Paris Metro Map: the Redesign. Seen 22 September 2019, https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/01/redesigning-the-paris-metro-map/

What Massimo Vignelli’s failed 1972 subway map can still teach us

Written by James Michael Boekbinder