Just when I thought I’d seen every possible variation on things designed “in the style of a subway/tube map”, along comes something to prove me completely wrong. This isn’t the latest Metro system – it’s a pizza delivery map. Have we been there? I believe I stopped in Tunbridge Wells very briefly to get some photos developed and have some lunch on my way from Hastings to London, all the way back in 1997. What […]
Presented without comment. Source: Very Small Array via Laughing Squid
Here’s another transit map made as a prop for a film, but with considerably more style and skill that the weird alternate universe DC Subway map for “Leverage” featured a while ago. At first glance, this prop – made for the 2008 film, “The Escapist” – looks like an exact replica of Harry Beck’s unusual and short-lived 1941 London Underground diagram, which uses 30- and 60-degree angles and “Olympic Ring” style station interchanges. Everything is […]
Just good enough to pass for the real thing when fleetingly seen in the background of a TV show. The map uses real DC Metro station names, but they’re all in the wrong places. The “corporate identity” uses the colours from the old TriMet livery… which is kind of neat, seeing as the show is filmed in Portland, TriMet’s base of operations. In the show, I believe that the Washington Park MAX station (the only […]
Designed to showcase two new typeface families from the FontFont foundry, this “Metro map” looks quite spectacular at first glance, with some lovely colour combinations and design details. It’s only on closer inspection that you realise that it’s actually a superb piece of nonsense – nothing really makes any sense at all. Most type – apart from the few major “stations” – is way too small to be useful, and the circled line designations are […]
Oktoberfest started yesterday in Munich, so I thought it would be appropriate to share this fun little map from 2008 of Munich’s beer gardens laid out in the familiar style of that city’s S- and U-Bahn map. However, beware! Although this map looks quite similar to the official one, the “lines” shown here don’t seem to correlate to the actual routes in real life — I would not recommend using this map on your Munich […]
By all accounts, Grand Theft Auto IV is a pretty awesome game. However, it would seem that the game’s designers are lousy urban planners, as this has to be the most ridiculous subway layout I have ever seen. Seriously, it looks like two racetrack layouts from a 1990s video game have been superimposed on the city with some stations added at random. What is the point of the northern track between Huntington St and the […]
Produced for the Sierra Club and very nicely done indeed. Having Yosemite and Yellowstone as the main “hubs” seems very appropriate. Sadly, I’ve only been to three of these parks – Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Crater Lake – something I’ll have to remedy. Finally, I love the disclaimer: *So incredibly not to scale and also fictional. Source: @BRFoo/Twitter
It’s been a good week for fantasy maps here on Transit Maps. Hot on the heels of the superb Freshwater Rail map comes this beauty from Michael Tyznik of his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. There’s an undoubted Massimo Vignelli 1970s New York Subway map vibe to this – Michael told me that this project actually began as an update of that map, but then morphed into another city altogether – but it still manages to […]
This map has to be part of the most convincing fantasy transit system I have ever seen. As well as this stylish and distinctive map, there’s an entire website, complete with additional bus maps, timetables and more. I’ll also note here that the website design puts most transit agencies to shame… If you weren’t familiar with Detroit, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was real (I kind of wonder how many tourists have been tricked […]
