#ixd102

Design Essay Research

‘The Great New York Subway Map’

by Emiliano Ponzi

“Both a love letter to New York City and an introduction to graphic design, this is the story of how the designer Massimo Vignelli tackled the problem of creating a subway map that could be understood by all New Yorkers as well as out-of-towners. Filled with depictions of trains, subway stations, and the New York City skyline, the book follows Vignelli around the city as he tries to understand the system in order to translate it into a map. The book is produced in collaboration with the New York Transit Museum and features a section of historical and archival images and photographs. A groundbreaking work of information design, the subway map designed by Vignelli is an iconic work used by over a billion people every year. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the original 1972 diagram in 2004.”

“Sagmeister: made you look”

This book captures various pieces of Sagmeister’s work, including posters, cd covers and graphics. It allows people to grow an understanding towards him and his work.

Week 01 Markdown Exercise

Compared to some of our other exercises so far this was a quick and easy one. We were given a text file and an image and asked to style the text with the image as a guide.

Markdown is a pretty nifty tool whose design ethos is all about readability. You could look at the .md file I used here and be able to read it with no issues.

Pointilism is the form of using tiny dots on a page in different colours to produce an overall image. 

Pauline and Kyle critiqued my poster design in class and made suggestions on how I could make my design stronger. 

This original design:

I was quite happy with my original design and both Kyle and Pauline seemed to like it, however, Pauline suggested that I enlarge the “g” so it stands out even more, and to shrink the text box with additional information in it down as it is not as relevant. They also suggested pushing the moving train design down lower to give more room for the giant “g”. 

I took these critiques into consideration and made an updated version of the design: