Submitted by Elliot, who says:

I’ve come across this blog a couple of months ago, and have been lurking ever since. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at designing a trasit diagram, and having gotten some free time, I decided to redesign the S-Train diagram for Brussels. So here it is, my very first finished(ish) transit diagram.

Transit Maps says:

A great first effort here from Elliot! I’d say that its arguably more successful that the official SNCB/NMBS diagram, which is a pretty staid and old-fashioned thing. However, while the official diagram shows all the other rail modes in the greater Brussels area, Elliot’s version only shows the S-Train lines. This makes the diagram much cleaner, though perhaps at the expense of understanding how it fits into the complete transit picture.

Still, it’s a very confident and stylish piece with a great underlying grid and a lovely colour palette that I feel actually gives some subtle structure to the design. It seems to me that all the lines that run through the central spine of Gare du Midi to Gare du Nord are cooler colours – greens and blues – while cross-town lines that circumvent the centre tend to be warmer colours. I do also note that none of the line colours match the colours from the official diagram, so make of that what you will.

Visually, I really like the treatment of the terminus stations, though I do wonder whether their similarity to the fare zone boundaries could be potentially confusing to readers – are these stations in some sort of special fare zone? Speaking of the zone boundaries, I’d like to see these simplified down further, reducing their shapes to the purest form possible to echo the rigid simplicity of the route lines.

Overall, I think the labelling on the diagram itself is a bit small – the type in the legend is bigger than the type on the map, and I don’t think that’s ever a good result. Likewise, the line bullets could be larger to enable rapid identification of each line. The walking time labels definitely need to be quite a bit bigger; they’re almost unreadable at any distance from the diagram.

Our final word: Lovely, stylish and minimalistic design. Finding the balance between the diagram design and type size is always one of the trickiest parts of transit map design and this could use a bit of tweaking to get it just right. Still, this is an awesome first diagram – great work, Elliot!