This past Friday, I wandered through the MoMA to look at a font. I had deducted that the 50 Years of Helvetica exhibition, was a must-see for designers and design geeks such as myself. However, I was disappointed in the relative size of the exhibition, regulated to a small corner shared with a gallery of well-designed objects — largely Swiss or German — in the Leonard Dobbs Architecture and Design Gallery on the 3rd floor of the MoMA.
The exhibit itself was limited to some posters and signage, one of which I was exceptionally impressed to see: Massimo Vignelli’s New York Subway Map, which was used from 1972-1979. I first read about this map in an article posted on Design Observer which offers much more information and backstory than the MoMA has accompanying the piece. It’s a great design that I think uses best practices for transit information, i.e. only 45/90 angles for abstracting track routes, as seen in the London tube and DC Metro maps.
Even with the map, the exhibit was underwhelming. The fact that I walked away from the exhibit with only the Vignelli MTA subway map on my mind makes me think I should have just watched Helvetica, a documentary on the typeface which is also happens to be the only other memorable part of the exhibit. And I say that only because it was on a large plasma screen monitor. This part of the film happened to be playing when I visited the exhibit:
Throughout my design career, I’ve used Helvetica for styled text more times than I haven’t. I thought I should pay my respects to what I had imagined would be a brilliant (but tastfully minimal) shrine to the typeface by including some more exhibits here: