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Design Systems

Eight Colours and One Alphabet

·6 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

The New York City Transit Authority’s graphics standards manual of 1970 has a page headed “Type face”, and one alphabet is set on it: Standard Medium, the name Akzidenz-Grotesk was sold under in the United States.1 Around that page the manual fixes letter and word spacing, type sizes and leading, an eight-colour code for the routes, and the modules from which sign plates are cut.1 A document like that records decisions already taken, so that nobody has to argue about the next sign. It is often asked to carry one more claim, that consistency of this kind earns a reader’s trust, and no study we know of supports it.2

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • A word space half the height of a capital
  • Familiarity, and what it was measured on
  • What has been measured about credibility
  • The grid a reader learns once
  • Where Unigrid gave way
  • The claim a standard can carry

About the book

Notes

  1. Unimark International 1970, Contents; p. 4 ‘Type face’; pp. 5–10 sizes, leading and letter spacing; p. 11 ‘Color coding’; Eskilson 2007, scan graphicdesignnew0000eski, leaf 474: the firm founded in 1965 by Vignelli, Noorda, Ralph Eckerstrom and others; New York Transit Museum n.d., introduction: the standard-signage effort began in 1966 with Unimark; Noorda and Vignelli as principals; Museum of Modern Art n.d., object text: Unimark invited by the Transit Authority in 1967; the manual released in 1970. The type page of the manual shows a single alphabet, Standard Medium, the American trade name for Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk; no set of five typefaces appears in it. The word space is specified as half the capital height. Read from the Internet Archive scan of the 1970 edition rather than from a printed copy. Evidence A: strong or direct evidence.
  2. Harley 2016, the four credibility factors and the design-quality section: visual consistency is not among them. A negative result from this edition’s audit: searches of Crossref, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar on 16 September 2026 returned no experimental study of typographic consistency against perceived trust, and the practitioner article the old text relied on names no such factor. Absence of a study in these indexes is weaker evidence than a study that looked and found nothing, which is why this sits at D. Evidence D: a reasonable inference.

Sources

  • Unimark International (1970). New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual archive.org
  • Stephen J. Eskilson (2007). Graphic Design: A New History. Yale University Press openlibrary.org
  • New York Transit Museum. Digital exhibit: Vignelli nytransitmuseum.org
  • Museum of Modern Art. Massimo Vignelli, Joan Charysyn, Bob Noorda, Unimark International. New York Subway Map, 1970–1972 moma.org
  • Harley, A. (2016). Trustworthiness in Web Design: 4 Credibility Factors. Nielsen Norman Group, 8 May 2016. nngroup.com

Further reading