The Times has a piece about the infamous Vignelli subway map, commissioned in 1972, widely derided for its geographic inaccuracies, and replaced in 1979. The inaccuracies were, of course, intentional. Massimo Vignelli, the map's designer, modeled it after Harry Beck's map of the London Underground, which simplified the complicated tube system into a more easily navigated form. Vignelli, for his part, blames the map's (he prefers to call it a diagram) failure on "verbal people" (as opposed to visual people) and the fact that he didn't simplify it enough. In 2011, when he was commissioned to designed "The Weekender" map, he included no geographical landmarks whatsoever. Click the map to make it bigger. [NYT; previously]
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