The Conflict of Colors Introduction by Petra Schmidt

Abstract

Colors as assumed names? Why not? After all, color identification has been used on the Lon- don Underground for decades. The encryption and abstraction of information using colors makes sense because they lend themselves so well to codification and orientation. This is what a previously unknown railway official called Harry Beck grasped in 1931 when he drew up a colored infographie of the London tube network, thereby providing the template for all such future diagrams. His abstract representation of the routes, stations, and transfer possibilities without regard for their physical reality, and his reduction of details to colors and lines remain exemplary even today.