Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

"Paul Shaw is another person with whom I have had a walk in New York. He is an historian and also designs types and is a calligrapher. He leads lettering tours, where the real focus of the tour, which could be somewhere like Italy, is to look at the varieties of lettering. That could be any kind of image of letters or numbers in a public space. It could be on a building, an inscription, underfoot or in signage. On our walk we wandered down the streets and looked at the variety of lettering and talked through what the type was. We looked at why some styles were successful and some were not so successful. You can learn a lot about the age of the sign and the business that it represented. Then there is ghost lettering, which is lettering on the side of a building that is fading over time and reflects now defunct businesses. This book is a really nice example of his obsession with lettering on signage. He talks about the typeface chosen for the New York City subway system, reported a few years ago to be Helvetica, which is a common typeface that everyone can use as a font on their computer. And Shaw reveals, through a lot of images and a lot of historical research, that for the most part it wasn’t Helvetica until recently. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided to use a similar but non-identical typeface, which is called Unimark Standard. He documents the differences between these designs and he goes through the subway and photographs Helvetica and Standard signs, and also more ancient signs in tiles and stones. Anyone who uses a subway system would enjoy his interest in the detail of subway signs. So all my five books have, I hope, shown how to open our eyes and look at the different layers around us. It slows you down on your walk but it is rewarding."