The new NYC TAXI logo is ugly and unsuccessful. Before I get to why, however, we should all be grateful that none of its many contributors—Smart Design, the Taxi & Limousine Commission, or NYC & Company and their designers at Wolff Olins—considered changing the taxi’s signature yellow color. The reason why cuts to the heart of what actually constitutes a taxi’s “idenitity” and what doesn’t. An identity is something we use to identify something out in the world. McDonalds’ golden arches help us to identify the fast food chain from the highway. The fact that it’s a McDonalds of Greater Cincinnati isn’t really part of its identity. We probably know we’re in Cincinnati and all we care about is getting something to eat.
The idea of a logo for NYC TAXI fails along the same lines. It’s an NYC TAXI because it’s yellow and we hail it in New York. It’s not an NYC TAXI because it says NYC TAXI on it, no matter what form those letters might take. Many designers, if faced with this brief, would question the need for this particular logo in the first place. The logo probably matters more to the Taxi & Limousine Commission as a sign of driver complaince than it does to people hailing a cab. It’s secondary to the customer’s experinence, so its placement, size, and form should indicate as much.
Still, the logo exists, and merits a more visual critique. Its committee of designers must have discussed the legibility of the logo from across the street moving at high speeds, and they have seemingly addressed this problem by making the letters NYC TAXI bolder. Here the new logo fails again. The design of highway signage has shown that legibility from a distance depends on the spaces inside letters remaining as open as possible. The upper floor of an A or twin bowls of a B shrink as we move further back and continue to shrink as these letters are made bolder. In the worst case letters become more like blobs, each indistinguishable from the next, and this happens to a certain degree in the NYC TAXI logo.
What helps us find bold text in a field of unbolded text is the change in tone from light to dark. On highway signs and taxicab liveries, where there are very few words and none of them unbolded, boldness doesn’t help—it hurts. The yellow color is bold so the letters in the logo needn’t be.
The formal problems continue from there. Capped letters are less differentiated from one another than letters left in upper- and lowercase. As in life, variety is a much-needed typographic spice. Despite branding concerns, two different typefaces with two different cap heights are unnecessary the logos they’re derived from are unimportant to riders looking for a taxi. Only one typeface is needed, and the original stencilled typeface was probably the clearest of the lot. And why this logo’s designers have further trashed legibility by breaking up the word “TAXI” in to “T/AXI” is beyond me. Either they were driven by an all-pervasive need for symmetry, balancing “AXI” against “NYC,” which is silly; or they wanted to turn the “T” into an unofficial subway line by circling it, which is also silly because all New Yorkers know that the circled T currently stands for Boston’s subway, not ours. (Although the MTA has now laid claim to the letter T for its 2nd Avenue extension.)
Interestingly enough, “taxi yellow” is not the invention of a New Yorker but of two Chicagoans, John Hertz and Walden Shaw, who introduced it in 1915. (Hertz’s rental car company still bears his name and signature black-and-yellow color scheme.) The two men settled on the color after a survey from the University of Chicago indicated that it was the easiest color to spot from a distance. Cabs after that came in one of two kinds: yellow or checkered. Like their yellow cousins, checkered cabs were also eye-catching from a distance and did not rely on reading to identify themselves. They’re like diagonally-striped hazard barriers or bright orange traffic cones. Color, shape, and pattern are the tools used here, not words. Eventually the two styles were combined, mostly because the difference between yellow cabs and checkered cabs were meaningless to anyone other than the companies operating those cabs. The new livery design shows the checkered marks dematerializing into a kind of fiber optic data stream. Assuming this is to indicate to us that the cab is wired up with GPS and Zagat Restaurant reviews, it’s unnecessary. We don’t hail a cab for any of these reasons, either.
Logos reach us best in two ways, through ubquity and use. A taxi’s persistent color identifies it; once we get inside one the experience it promises from the street becomes our own. Sometimes it’s okay for things to look banal and official as long as they’re clear. Nutrition labels are some of the best-designed things around.
The designers do take a small step forward by reorganizing the heirarchy of the taxi’s fare pricing and giving it a helpful pictogram for proper hailing posture, though putting it in smallish caps is another legibility faux pas. Also, individual cab numbers are easier to read now than their spray-painted predecessors, but, in this designer’s opinion, they do not keep NYC TAXI logo from needing a pretty massive rethink.
This article first appeared as part The New York Times’s City Room series, “Assessing the Taxi Logo.” The online version is available here. All the articles in the series are available here.
