The discovery of a lost audio recording sheds new light on a pivotal event in design history: the 1978 debate between designer Massimo Vignelli and cartographer John Tauranac over the future of the NYC Subway Map. The New York Subway Map Debate features the full transcript and discussions that followed, along with never-before-seen photographs of the evening by Stan Ries. Edited by filmmaker and design historian Gary Hustwit, with a foreword by designer Paula Scher. Visuelle Kommunikation - Datenvisualisierung - Wayfinding - Wegfindung - Orientierungssystem.
The NASA Graphics Standards Manual, by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn, is a futuristic vision for an agency at the cutting edge of science and exploration. Housed in a special anti-static package, the book features a foreword by Richard Danne, an essay by Christopher Bonanos, scans of the original manual (from Danne's personal copy), reproductions of the original NASA 35mm slide presentation, and scans of the Managers Guide, a follow-up booklet distributed by NASA.
The evolving design of New York subway ephemera: a collector's story New York City Transit Authority: Objects originated as a photography experiment. In 2011, New York photographer Brian Kelley began documenting collections of used MetroCards in his Brooklyn studio, arranging them in various grids with the goal of perfecting the lighting of an image. His brother suggested he make the grids more interesting by finding other types of cards. Having exhausted his search for discarded MetroCards in many of the city's 472 subway stations, Kelley turned to eBay for new finds. The online rabbit-hole gave him a crash course in the history of NYC transportation. He discovered tokens dating back to 1860, a ticket stub from 1885 when it cost three cents to take the train across the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as patches, matchbooks, tokens, timetables, pins and signs, posting his photographs of these finds on Tumblr and Instagram. Six years on, many MTA employees follow and advocate his project, sometimes contacting him with information and tips on rare items. As the collection grew, Kelley recognized that there were no comparable digital archives documenting the city's transportation evolution. New York City Transit Authority: Objects is a story told through the evolving design that spans decades of the city's history. Kelley's objects tell a greater story of New York's past. For him, The NYCTA Project remains a photography experiment and self-funded hobby, archiving the culture of his home city. For the reader, it's an intimate view of the city's history that merges design and infrastructure over the past 150 years.
In 2013 filmmaker and photographer Gary Hustwit spent the day photographing Massimo and Lella Vignelli at their home studio in Manhattan. "I didn't have any idea what I'd do with the images. But I wanted to try to capture the feeling of being in that place, with the two of them, at that point in their lives." Vignelli passed away in 2014. Now Hustwit is publishing a selection of those images in Vignelli: Photographs, a small-format hardcover book. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
"Design is a way to engage with real content, real experience," writes celebrated essayist Michael Bierut in this follow-up to his best-selling Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design (2007). In more than fifty smart and accessible short pieces from the past decade, Bierut engages with a fascinating and diverse array of subjects. Essays range across design history, practice, and process; urban design and architecture; design hoaxes; pop culture; Hydrox cookies, Peggy Noonan, baseball, The Sopranos; and an inside look at his experience creating the "forward" logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Other writings celebrate such legendary figures as Jerry della Femina, Alan Fletcher, Charley Harper, and his own mentor, Massimo Vignelli. Bierut's longtime work in the trenches of graphic design informs everything he writes, lending depth, insight, and humor to this important and engrossing collection.
Jon Pack is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose work has been exhibited in galleries in the US and Europe, and has appeared on book covers from publishers including Simon & Schuster and Random House. His previous projects include the limited-edition book Out There; That Thing We Call Nature.
Speed. Color. Sound. Numbers. Maps. Connections. Navigation. Subway systems may be specific to certain cities around the world, but the pure thrill of a subway ride is universal to all young children. Christoph Niemann’s graphically elegant and playful picture book is a tour de force for preschoolers and a stellar addition to the canon of books about trains, trucks, planes, and automobiles. Based on the author’s own underground adventures with his young boys—chronicled for adult readers in Niemann’s New York Times blog, Abstract City—this innovative picture book is an invitation down underground, where a system of trains and tracks delivers millions of riders to their destinations each day. “Underneath the city is this beautifully simple system of letters, numbers, and colors. The trains and stations are huge and impressive but also comforting, because nothing ever changes. My boys are in charge; they can read the signs, navigate the grid, and they always know what happens next.”—Christoph Niemann
Winner of the 2011 Empire State History Book Award presented by New York State Archives Partnership Trust The Man Who Saved New York offers a portrait of one of New York's most remarkable governors, Hugh L. Carey, with emphasis on his leadership during the fiscal crisis of 1975. In this dramatic and colorful account, Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner's examine Carey's youth, military service, and public career against the backdrop of a changing, challenged, and recession-battered city, state, and nation. It was Carey's leadership, Lachman and Polner argue, that helped rescue the city and state from the brink of financial and social ruin. While TV comedians mocked and tabloids shrieked about the Big Apple's rising muggings, its deteriorating public services, and the threats and walkouts by embattled police, firefighters, and teachers, all amid a brutal recession, Carey and his team managed to hold on and ultimately prevailed, narrowly preventing a huge disruption to the state, national, and global economy. At one point, the city came within a few hours of having to declare itself incapable of paying its debts and obligations, but in the end stability and consensus prevailed, and America's largest city stayed out of bankruptcy court. The center held. Based on extensive interviews with Carey and his family, as well as numerous friends, observers, and former advisors, including Steven Berger, David Burke, John Dyson, Peter Goldmark, Judah Gribetz, Richard Ravitch, and Felix Rohatyn, The Man Who Saved New York aims to place Carey and his achievements at the center of the financial maelstrom that met his arrival in Albany. While others were willing to let the city go into default, Carey was strongly opposed, since it would not only affect the state as a whole but would have reverberations both nationally and internationally. In recounting the 1975 rescue of New York City and the aftershocks that nearly sank the state government, Lachman and Polner illuminate the often-volatile interplay among elite New York bankers, hard-nosed municipal union leaders, the press, and influential conservatives and liberals from City Hall to the Albany statehouse to the White House. Although often underappreciated by the public, it was Carey's force of will, wit, intellect, judgment, and experiences that allowed the state to survive this unparalleled ordeal and ultimately to emerge on a stronger footing. Further, Lachman and Polner argue, Carey's accomplishment is worth recalling as a prime example of how governments—local, state, and federal—can work to avoid the renewed the threat of bankruptcy that now confronts many overstretched states and localities.
