This is a taxi strike?

You could have fooled me. The streets, they are awash in taxis - most now bearing the world’s most amateurish logo. If that was why the taxi drivers were striking - over the offense to their aesthetics - I could get behind it. Or understand it. And they’d all go out instead of this “every 10th taxi stay home” strategy.

Hmmmm . . . you know, striking to protest that logo isn’t a bad idea. But it’s the rest of us who should strike. After all, the taxi driver is inside the taxi and doesn’t have to look at it. The rest of us are bombarded with the things every time we turn around. The flowered hoods help a bit. Let us band together and refuse to take taxis until the logo is improved or - eliminated all together as I am still unclear as to why it was necessary in the first place.

I touched on this taxi logo insanity briefly in an earlier post but I’ve been looking at the various alternatives that either weren’t chosen, were proposed by other designers or that were done by the public. Much like the Olympic logo kerfuffle of this summer, the general populace did far, far better than those chosen to get it done.

The fact that the design company did the work for free makes me feel not one whit better. It looks like “design by committee” - specifically, “design by blind, utterly without understanding of typography committee.” And in a sense, it was done by committee. It started out bland and devolved into terrible. Why? The step by step description in the NYT makes it very clear - client input.

Phase One: Presented with initial design, city officials said that the all-type logo was not flashy enough. Huh? It’s for the side of a taxi. What do they want?

Phase Two: A revised logo was stolen - uh - borrowed from the encircled T from Boston public transit. “Nope,” said city officials. “The MTA wants to use T for the future Second Avenue subway. We like the graphic T but put the words back in to prevent confusion.” Huh? Because it’s so easy to confuse a bright yellow car on the street with a long silver train moving through an underground tunnel?

Phase Three: the letters now “NYC” and “AXI” appeared on either side of the T in a black circle. It couldn’t get worse, right? Wrong. NY & Company unveiled it’s new “NYC identity” campaign (designed, I kid you not, by Wolff Olins the same people who did the London 2012 logo) and the new taxi logo was changed to include the chunky font used in that campaign. But, just for laughs, only the font for “NYC” was changed. The “AXI” part stayed the same.

And since we’re on the subject on transit, why is the Second Avenue subway going to be designated “T”? What significance does “T” have, if any?