Subway signs are rather mysterious creatures. Really do we see work crews hanging up new signs, but somehow, whenever the MTA adjusts its routes, the ubiquitous black signs hanging up in stations change along with it. An article in the Washington Post this week illuminates the sign-making process the District of Columbia’s WMATA. While their system is smaller and less prone to service changes than ours, Metro’s in-house sign shop makes 40,000 signs and decals a year. I can only imagine how busy New York’s own sign-makers are.
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The transit museum ran a series of tours a year or so ago and one of them was a tour of the NYCT sign shop out in Crown Heights.
http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2008/0BBD
It’s a pretty impressive operation, smaller than one would think, and if I recall correctly, they make over 120,000 decals a year, though many of those are for in-house stuff that the customers never see. Some are put on aluminum and mounted in the stations while some are put directly on existing signs. And they constantly replace these “patched” signs with high quality, durable, painted signs.
Apparently there are over 75,000 “customer” signs in the entire subway system, something like 10 at the smallest station and over 800 at the largest. A major route change (like after 9/11) will require 5,000 of those signs to be changed over a few weeks.
Highly recommended if they ever have it again.
Speaking of signage, here’s a great article on the intertwined/parallel histories of Helvetica and NYC’s subway signage. It details almost every part of the transition from the original unorganized signage to the somewhat unified system based on the system originally created by graphic design legend Massimo Vignelli and his associates at Unimark 40 years ago.
Ooops: http://www.aiga.org/content.cf.....ubway?pp=1