Rare 1977 New York City Subway IRT Roll Sign Vignelli 1968 Colors NYCTA

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Rare 1977 New York City Subway IRT Roll Sign Vignelli 1968 Colors NYCTA :
$925.00

This is one of the rarest mylar-era New York City subway rollsigns, which only comes up for sale occasionally. I\'m thinning out some of the duplicates in my collection, so I\'m putting this one up for sale. Very few of these rolls were printed, as the IRT barely saw the 1968 color redesign that so many IND cars were signed for. The MTA produced two editions of these rolls (code 14-81-7480 with a grey 5 produced by Trans-Lite, code 14-81-7378 with this strange black bullet 5 that shows as no bullet at all produced by Transign), and one edition of the side rollsign on a white background (American Identification Products, code 14-81-7495). These rolls were only produced in the late 1970s, right before the 1979 trunk line color switch, so they saw extremely limited use before being replaced. The side rolls were modified to 1979 colors, while these were mostly scrapped. This one was torn from the sign box, and so its ends are ripped where the mylar was yanked. This is the only NYCTA rollsign to ever show the \'bulletless\' black 5, or the green \"SS\" shuttle. I\'ve only seen one of these on before. Condition is good, with modest creasing throughout and some fading/staining. The \'2\' bullet has lost its full color, but the others are in vibrant shape.
On permanent display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the New York Museum of Modern Art is Massimo Vignelli\'s famed contribution to modernist urban design: elements of his 1966-1970 redesign, with Bob Noorda of Unimark Associates, of the New York City subway system. Unimark was contracted to rethink the entire sign language of the subway system from maps to physical signs, and today the design has proven so successful that the entire system still follows the general Helvetica-laden design Vignelli originally sought.

While Vignelli\'s maps are frequently traded on the market and his Graphic Standards Manual has been re-introduced as part of a widely-successful reprinting campaign, the physical elements of his redesign are few and far between. Even at the two MoMas, which preserve some of Vignelli\'s contributions, the genuine signs designed per Vignelli\'s standards once used in the subway are absent from display. Vignelli had crafted a design language for enamel signs in stations, as well as scrolling \'roll\' signs on trains, and this sign is one of the latter works.

Those \'rolls\' have their own history. Before the advent of LCD screens and the modernizing of the New York subway\'s directional signage and station signage, the process of indicating a destination was rather rudimentary. For every possible route and destination of a train line, an individual sign was reverse printed on a semi-translucent mylar (an industrial plastic that replaced vellum in many uses) \'roll\' sign, upon which the train\'s conductor was required to select the appropriate sign for any service a train might run. Roll signs proved cumbersome and tedious, however, and by the 1990s the vast majority of the signs had been replaced with screens or broken into smaller sign modules that could be individually chosen at a quicker pace.

In the now legendary 1972 Graphic Standards Manual (reprinted recently to great critical acclaim), rollsigns just like this one were codified per Vignelli\'s desires: colored sign \"bullet\" would indicate a numbered lines, with each line receiving its own color. The colors were wild and vibrant, with teal for the \"3\" and magenta for the \"4,\" offering far more color than the matching greens and reds of the subway today. Vignelli\'s original design would shift over the years as colors changed, but this is one such original sign from the beginning of the Vignelli sign era. It is an exceedingly rare sign that is one of the few printed examples of Vignelli\'s subway signs for the numbered (IRT) lines. These signs were rarely installed, quickly made obsolete, and present only in incredibly small numbers today.

The roll was used in service for some time, so there is minor wear and dirt on the sign, but overall condition is excellent. Only the \"2\" has faded in color slightly. The sign is dated at the end of the blank white space on top and bottom (torn at the ends) to 1977. This was only two years before the Vignelli color scheme was abandoned, and consequently this sign marks an important piece of history as well as a bold, modernist room statement. The blank white is not included in the listed height of 10.5 feet.