Because of budget cuts, two lines are going away later this month. (I hope to attend one of the transit funerals for the V or W train! Anybody with me?)

A currently unused stretch of track—the Chrystie Street Connection—will be reopened to make way for the rerouted M.

All kinds of bus routes are being changed.

And in a strange move, this week the MTA accidentally posted a monument to Internet woe when it labeled the 14th Street/6th Avenue station with FML (“fuck my life”) signs.

The new routes take effect June 27, but new subway maps are already up in some stations, including Atlantic Avenue/Pacific Street in Brooklyn.

What’s new about the map? The most obvious change is that the color of the land has been adjusted from beige to an earthy khaki color. The designers have tried to make the map simpler, eliminating some confusing and seldom-used information about bus connections and which lines operate at which hours.

Here’s the new map:

Of the changes, the only one I don’t like is the addition of solid grey shadows behind the subway lines.

New map:

Old map:

Another weird change I noticed is the the new map drops the name of the designer, Michael Hertz Associates, from the copyright line.

New map:

Old map:

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Then I got an e-mail from a reader named Amanda pointing out an error in one of my recent posts about subway signage. Based on a book I read, I have been calling the New York City Subway font Akzidenz-Grotesk. In fact, Akzidenz-Grotesk has been all-but-phased out in favor of a custom version of Helvetica. Some of the “buttons” (those colorful circles that represent the subway lines) are still set in Akzidenz-Grotesk, but most of the signage has been upgraded. Amanda even attached a graphic showing the difference between the two fonts…

Helvetica is on the top line and on the left button; Akzidenz-Grotesk on the bottom line and the right button. Note the differences in the cuts on the C and the e. Neat.

Anyway, this feedback convinced me that I’m not the only one who cares about subway signs. And so I dug up the blog post I had deleted earlier. Here it is:

* * * *

The Flatbush Avenue Long Island Railroad Station, under construction for most of the decade, has finally opened. Recently I walked through it on my way to run an errand (a few days before they opened the staircase, seen above). It looks mostly fine, and will plug a hole in the streetscape around the busy Atlantic Avenue intersection. But I have a bone to pick. They’re using the wrong font on the subway signs.

Do you see it? Compare the two sets of subway icons below (the top one from the new LIRR terminal, bottom from elsewhere in the same subway station). It’s very close, but the width of the letters, especially the M, is obviously incorrect on the new sign.

A logo set in the wrong font is like the Van Halen cover of “You Really Got Me,” the 1998 remake of Psycho, or Hunt’s ketchup. It’s not just off, it’s wrong. Even people who don’t care about fonts will register this typographic lapse somewhere in their subconscious. They’re being imprinted with a message: “There’s something chintzy about this train station.” Multiply that by 30,000 riders a day and it reflects poorly on mass transit, and poorly on Brooklyn.

Sadly, this lack of attention to detail is typical of the Brooklyn construction projects overseen by developer Bruce Ratner and his company Forest City. (The LIRR station is attached to Forest City’s Atlantic Terminal shopping mall). In concept, there’s nothing wrong with projects like the Atlantic Terminal, Atlantic Center, the Metrotech office complex, the Lowe’s in Gowanus, or even the proposed Atlantic Yards mega-development. (I don’t count myself among the neighborhood activists who oppose Atlantic Yards on principle.) Big buildings belong in the city, and the designs make sense on paper.

But when you go to any of these buildings, they aren’t enjoyable places to be. They feel half-assed. For example, anybody who’s ever walked down from Park Slope to the Lowe’s can tell you the building is obviously facing the wrong way. (The front doors face a fetid canal and a gravel factory, and the loading docks face the neighborhood.)

At other developments, like in the Atlantic Avenue malls, it’s harder to explain what’s wrong. If you live in Brooklyn, next time you go there, look around. Pedestrians’ eyes don’t seem to be focused on anything in particular. There’s no balance or sense of space. People get confused; no one walks with confidence. Take a few minutes and try to walk from Target to Pathmark through the indoor passageway. I can think of only one way to describe it: Habitrail.

Designs like this fail to respect the hard-core individualism of New Yorkers. They fall short of great New York shopping spaces such as Rockefeller Center, the Time Warner Center, or the gold standard, Grand Central Terminal.

All three of those places, by the way, use the proper font for their subway signs.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

As it happens, I had to catch the subway at Columbus Circle tonight. The first sign I noticed was another one of those weird black-on-white signs, presumably indicating a semi-permanent change due to station construction.

Then I saw this abomination:

Sure enough! Rather than being set in the usual subway font (a Helvetica variation called Akzidenz-Grotesk [Update: Actually Helvetica]), it’s set in something very different and obviously inferior. It looks stretched.

But nothing prepared me for what was next. Rounding a corner and heading down the stairs, I saw this highly irregular sign:

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I know, I’m odd about these things. But subway signs are white on black, not black on white! Why is the MTA futzing with its iconic signage?

I have a theory. I noticed a similar switch-a-roo last year in the Chambers Street station. Those oddball signs at Chambers are gone now. I think they were installed during a temporary change to the station layout, when a stairway was closed for repair work.

Likewise, these signs at DeKalb signal that the trains are temporarily skipping some stations, which are closed for repair work that will last a while. Maybe when there’s a change that’s permanent enough to require a new metal sign, but not so permanent it’s going to last forever, the MTA installs white signs instead of black ones. It’s a signal to the passenger to take special notice of this sign.

I might be wrong. On the F line, the new signs indicating the multi-year—but temporary—extension of the G train don’t look like this. They’re the standard white-on-black metal signs.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Would you rent a home from a company who’s logo appears to be a home on fire?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Item: The new Tropicana juice carton, designed by Arnell Group and introduced last month, is so loathed by customers that PepsiCo is switching back to the old design.

Let us raise a glass of juice and toast Tropicana for messing with the juice carton! The rejected design (which, by the way, took 30 people five months to develop) was just right for these times. It had simple graphics, bold san-serif type and a functional color scheme. The only illustration was a picture of the product in its purest form: juice in a glass. The horizontal bar on the top of each carton made it easy to spot the kind of juice you wanted in the supermarket. And best of all, the Tropicana carton included exactly one whimsical indulgence: A plastic cap shaped like an orange – easy to grip and twist, a surprise-and-delight feature.

Unfortunately, customers were unprepared for this bold leap toward modernism. And Tropicana caved once initial feedback proved negative. (Wasn’t at least one of those 30 design people in charge of customer research?) I enjoy orange juice at breakfast, and this carton was a nice thing to look at for a few seconds every morning. It will be missed. [Sound of "Danny Boy" being played on bagpipes.]

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Are we in the dark ages of logo design? Just look at the above examples – beginning with the Payless logo introduced in 2006 and continuing through the Kraft Foods logo introduced yesterday. I mean, really? Is everybody using the same WordArt template?

Even the new Pepsi logo has been derided variously as a rip-off of the Obama campaign logo to an exercise in delusional self-importance.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

… knowing full well that some of the people they handed it to were journalists who would blog about it, as I did here on my work blog. I give this stunt an ‘A’ for effort.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

But Andrew Hearst on the Panopticist blog has noticed that the wheels fall off during the ending credits – which are set in Arial! He does a better job than I can explaining why this is a crime against art:

“This is obviously a small detail. But Mad Men is a show that matches small details as well as any series that’s ever been on the air. Why does such a pitch-perfect show end with such a jarring anachronism?”

Come to think of it, the ending credits of most good shows are usually boring and slap-dash. I wonder why?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.