Unofficial Map: Metro do Porto Redesign by Eduardo Barros

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Submitted by Eduardo, who says:

This is my redesign of the Porto map for my University course. Your review of the real one helped me!

Transit Maps says:

This is a nice reworking of the official map, Eduardo – converting it from a stylised geographical map into a proper schematic diagram (the official map hasn’t changed too much since I reviewed it way back in 2012). I will quietly note that you’ve lifted the typography, logo and iconography directly from the official map, which is probably fine for a student project, but definitely something you have to be cautious with for real work.

Apart from that, the diagram looks quite lovely. It’s definitely more compact than the sprawling official map, which has the added benefit of making the type correspondingly larger, so that’s a good thing. The main failing of your work in my eyes is having stations placed exactly on a point where the lines change direction. This is something I always try to avoid, as it never looks right to me. On your diagram, it’s especially obvious at Via Rapida (where the station dots are at an odd 22.5-degree angle) and at Heroismo, where the station dots are on a sharp point. I’d look at respacing all the stations from Senhora da Hora all the way around to Estadio do Dragao more evenly, taking care that no stations are placed where a line changes direction. Look out for this in other places as well!

Similarly, I prefer not to have branching lines change direction directly under a station:they should always travel parallel to the other lines for a little way before branching off to make the transition a little easier to follow. It’s especially jarring where the light blue “A” line branches off at Denhora da Hora, as there’s a hard acute angle there, right under the station dot. I prefer to use curves where lines change direction for a softer, easier to follow route, although I do respect the stylistic decision for hard angles as well.

One further note: I’d move the zone boundaries to the bottom of the information hierarchy: they sit above both the route lines and the station names at the moment… things look a bit messy where they overlap labels at Campanha and Estadio do Dragao, for example.

Overall, this is a nice reimagining of the official map, though there’s still room for a bit of tweaking here and there to tighten the design up a bit more. I’d also love to see a version of this where you make the design more obviously “yours” rather than relying on the design language of the official map. 

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