We’ve featured plenty of Nick’s work on Transit Maps before – he has an uncanny knack of taking something familiar and mundane and looking at it from a completely new perspective. 

His new project, “Between Stations” is no exception, as he literally pulls apart subway systems from around the world and rearranges them into attractive circular forms. No scaling or rotation of the line segments is performed, they’re just rearranged to fill the circle. What’s really interesting is that each circle is unique and different, much like a fingerprint. New York’s angled street grid is still obvious (above), London is still a tangled mess, and so on.

Nick has a whole page on the methodology behind the making of the maps – a curious mixture of automated data and manual work – and there are also posters for sale.

However, I could just stare all day at the animated GIFs that morph the subway systems into their fingerprints and back again. Mesmerising!