I'm glad to see the discussion on the Times's City Room blog about the new official TLC Taxi logo and paint job. The change took me by surprise and no one seemed to be saying much about it for the first couple of weeks. I had much the same reaction as some of the commenters--it didn't seem like it could be real, that something so fundamental to the everyday experience of New York City could change without a word.

The Times asked several graphic designers to comment on the redesign and they are mostly restrained, probably out of professional courtesy and karmic concern. In the comments it's pretty much a merciless trashing, over and over. They also have a narrative explaining how the process was a clear case of design by committee. The blocky, blobby, nearly illegible "NYC" in the logo is apparently a general logo for the city from New York & Company; if we're going to be seeing a lot more of that, I can only say god help us (though it's actually hard to imagine a more ubiquitous usage of it than on taxis). Many have commented on the circled T as reminiscent of Boston's public transit symbol, and possibly headed for future confusion with the 2nd Avenue subway line, also of the name name.

The feature of the redesign getting the most praise, if you can call it that, is the reorganized description of the fare structure. But some have also said that it is too small. Personally, I have been trying to see what it says for the past week, and only today did I finally get close enough to a cab that was still enough to be able to read it for a couple of seconds!

It's hard to know whether such a reaction, uniformly negative yet limited to a few websites, can be hoped to have any effect. It's not like there are going to be rallies and riots about a redesign, though I wouldn't mind living in a place where there were. This is probably just one of those things, like the redesigned dollar bills, that seems terrible and shocking at first, and then we get used to it surprisingly quickly.