By the time you read this, I’ll be lazing around on a beach in Hawaii on a well-earned break – but thanks to the wonders of scheduled posts, I can still share this new teaser image of my ongoing Boston MBTA map redesign with you.

This one shows the central part of Boston with my conceptual grid overlaid on top, so you can see how important elements relate to each other. Every design decision made here is intentional: this is not one of those grids people create at the end of a project to make it look better thought-out than it actually was.

I decided right at the beginning that the Orange and Green lines should form a big sweeping arc centred on Bowdoin station; it just seemed more elegant than short curves linked by straight segments. Note how the radius used for the Green Line’s curve is then repeated for the Blue Line between Government Center and Aquarium. The Orange Line’s radius is reused and flipped northwards of North Station. The Red Line is also neatly and perfectly tangential to the radius of the Orange Line as it heads towards Charles/MGH.

The other major compositional element is the strong horizontal axis created along the Red Line, through Bowdoin, Haymarket and Maverick stations, and on to the “C” marker for the Airport Silver Line station. This gives the whole map a strong visual base to hold it together, and works really well in my opinion.