Work in Progress: Making a Grid!
Making a grid! Using existing elements in a design to create a comprehensive, useful grid that can be applied across the rest of the map. See my Sydney Festival Route Map project page for more information.
Month: October 2014
Updated DC Metro Veterans Day Map
Update: the Washington DC Metro Veterans Day Map now includes the Rosslyn–Pentagon shuttle bus service (shown as a dotted blue line with relevant call-out box). It’s like they’re reading my mind! Source: WMATA website – link no longer active
Project: 2015 Sydney Festival Route Map
If you've ever been to Sydney in January, then you'll know that the Sydney Festival is a big deal. Running for almost the entire month, it brings together the very best in the arts from around Australia and the world – music, dance, performance and more. So I was more than a little bit excited when I was commissioned to produce this thematic "route map" of highlighted events, to be used both online and in the Festival's printed program/brochure.
Historical Map: Proposed City Railway Company Lines, New York, c. 1890s
Cutaway diagram, map, and accompanying text describing the construction of an electric motor-powered rapid transit subway that would have run through the basements of “fire-proofed buildings constructed along the line”. Despite shallow excavations of only nine-and-a-half feet, the blurb promises “no perceptible vibrations from the passage of trains”. Hmmm. nyplmaps: The City Railway Company, rapid transit passenger lines [189-?] This map shows the location of a proposed underground rapid transit line and an “alternative line” in […]
Official Map: Veterans Day Service, Washington DC Metro
An interesting modification of the Washington DC Metro map sent my way by a couple of readers. On November 11, there will be no Blue Line trains at all, with those trains instead becoming “special” Yellow Line trains designed to get as many people to the National Mall as quickly as possible. The reason? The “Concert for Valor”, which is expected to draw a staggering 800,000 people (I really feel sorry for those who still […]
The “Transit Maps” Blog is Three Today!
Wow! It seems like just yesterday that I made my first post on this blog, yet here we are three years down the road already! Thanks to each and every follower – over 23,000 on Tumblr*, 1,985 on Twitter, and 716 on my Facebook Page – I really couldn’t have lasted this long without your likes, retweets, reblogs, questions and submissions. A focus for the upcoming year will definitely be to be more responsive to questions […]
Project: McKinney Avenue Trolley Map (Dallas, Texas)
Here's a small project that was inspired by a message to my Transit Maps blog about the currently existing map for the McKinney Avenue heritage trolley line in Dallas, Texas. However, rather than review and criticise a map produced for a non-profit organisation (most likely by a volunteer or staff in their spare time), I thought that I would create a new, accurate, more user-friendly map instead.
Tutorial: Drawing Complex Highway Interchanges in Illustrator
This is kind of a tangent to my normal tutorials, but I had a surprising number of requests for this after I published my McKinney Avenue Trolley map, so here goes! The first thing to note is that this is not a 100-percent accurate representation of the interchange: this trolley map is not intended to be a road map or to be used to navigate freeways. I want to communicate the idea of an interchange […]
Future Map: Proposed Extension to the Bakerloo Tube Line, London
Very much in TfL’s house style, even as a more geographical map. Mainly interesting because it’s a major expansion of the Tube south of the Thames, which has historically been underserved by the Underground. If you live in London and want to have say in the routing of this line, then you should go and take TfL’s survey. More information on the project can be found here, where I also sourced this image from.
New Adobe Illustrator “Join Tool” Aids Transit Map Design!
When Adobe Illustrator finally introduced “Live Corners” in January of this year, I was overjoyed. They’d taken one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks in transit mapping – generating properly nested sets of rounded corners where route lines changed direction – and turned it into something intuitive, quick and 100-percent accurate every time. However, it didn’t solve every problem. Joining two separate paths into one (so that Live Corners could be applied to the […]