By the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, traffic jams, aging buses and subways, heavy pollution, and confusing street signage made transportation through New York City nightmarish. Though writing in a rhetorical style that included a note of hyperbole, the graphic designer William McCaffery claimed in an essay included in Print that an ant could make it downtown faster than any human traveler could, so congested was the built environment facing New York's citizens. The crawl of traffic described in the article, though, was not viewed as merely a problem with cars, city streets, or density, but rather was laid out as a complex agglomeration of factors, one for which a simple fix, such as a freeway cutting through Manhattan neighborhoods, would not be an acceptable cure. To engage with such complexity would require collaboration from several areas of expertise. As we have seen in previous chapters, designers began to examine the problems facing New York City's built environment in earnest in the mid-1960s, teaming with urban planners, the mayor's office, and architects to devise solutions via visual communication. However, designers also began to understand that their own expertise would be called upon to complete these tasks. As McCaffrey wrote,

Coming from the world of advertising, in which overhauls of corporate identities, branding, and advertising were adopted wholesale so as to optimize their effectiveness at developing a commercial image, graphic designers must undoubtedly have anticipated similar implementation of their civic designs, as well.