page_title: New York City Subway map
section_title: History of color coding
hierarchical_section_title: New York City Subway map / Color coding for subway routes / History of color coding
caption_attribution_description: old map
context_page_description: Many transit maps for the New York City Subway have been designed since the subway's inception in 1904. Because the subway was originally built by three separate companies, an official map for all subway lines was not created until 1940, when the three companies were consolidated under a single operator. Since then, the official map has undergone several complete revisions, with intervening periods of comparative stability.
  The current iteration of the New York City Subway map dates from a design first published in 1979. The official map has evolved gradually under the control of the Marketing and Corporate Communications Department of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The 1979 design was created by the MTA Subway Map Committee, chaired by John Tauranac, which outsourced the graphic design of the map to Michael Hertz Associates.
context_section_description: From 1904 to 1967, subway routes on the official subway map were drawn either in a single color or in three colors, which corresponded to the company that the route operated on — the IRT, BMT, or IND. Still, after the 1940 unification of the three companies' routes under the umbrella of a Board of Transportation—later the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA)—the three networks continued to operate separately and were generally referred to by their old names. Both maps and the station signage continued to refer to the historical IRT, BMT, and IND.  In 1964, a major review of wayfinding was triggered by the combination of two things: the large influx of visitors for the 1964 New York World's Fair, which made the subway and bus maps confusing to some visitors; and the connection of the BMT and IND networks through the 60th Street Tunnel Connection and the soon-to-be-opened Chrystie Street Connection, which rendered the three-color scheme unworkable.
  In 1964, the NYCTA launched the Subway Map Competition to get public input on redesigning the subway map, and in 1966 it engaged Unimark International to advise on signage and on the results of the Subway Map Competition.  The winners of the competition were R. Raleigh D’Adamo, Harris Schechtman, and Mary & John Condon. The TA forwarded D’Adamo's report on his competition map to Professor Stanley Goldstein of Hofstra University, who was engaged to develop prototype maps. Goldstein reported in June 1965, and two of his prototype maps were combined by the TA Designs Division, and the result passed to Diamond Packaging, who refined the design and printed the NYCTA's first route-colored subway map in November 1967. To coordinate with the new color scheme in the map, the NYCTA began to roll out new station and car signage based on a design by Vignelli and Robert Noorda of Unimark International, using the route markers derived from those specified in D’Adamo's report.
  The biggest innovation in this redevelopment of the map was the introduction of color-coding by subway route, which D’Adamo recommended in his report to replace the outdated three-color scheme. After some experimentation, D’Adamo found a set of colors for subway lines that avoided clashes; Goldstein used D’Adamo's concept but invented his own color allocation; and finally Dante Calise at Diamond Packaging devised the color assignment that was used in the published map of 1967.  Those colors were inherited by Unimark International and used in the famous 1972 Vignelli map. That color scheme was rearranged by Tauranac in 1979 to create a trunk-colored map.
caption: A map from the early 1990s.
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