I found a 1959 map showing Class I railroads in the USA and Canada. The map was beautiful, but what really struck me was the border, which had the logos of the railroad companies featured on the map. It's not often that you get to see so many contemporaneous historical logos from the same industry, so I cleaned them up in Photoshop to make this poster that showcases them.
If you ever wanted your own copy of the latest iteration of this design classic, here’s your chance. The newly-formed design firm of Waterhouse Cifuentes (founded by Massimo Vignelli’s collaborators Yoshiki Waterhouse and Beatriz Cifuentes) is now offering superb prints on their SuperWarmRed Designs website. As the description on the website says: This poster of the MTA New York City Subway Diagram was designed in 2012 by Vignelli Associates and is used in the MTA’s […]
Having found and digitally restored the fantastic 1926 map of the U.S. Highway system, I started to look around to see if I could find a similar map from the advent of the newer Interstate Highway network. However, all my usual sources came up with either nothing or only low resolution scans -- certainly nothing suitable for reproduction. So, what's a map-obsessed graphic designer to do in this situation? Why, redraw the whole thing faithfully from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, of course!
I came across this great 1926 map of the original Numbered U.S. Highway System via an article on CityLab. As I looked, I began to see that while the quality of the scan was good, and the content of the map was fascinating, the map itself was in a pretty sorry state -- so I decided to digitally restore it.
I’m very pleased to report that full production of the 44″ x 72″ Highways of the United States posters has begun. I’d like to thank everyone who has ordered so far for their patience as we got this process up and running. As you can see from the attached video, printing these beasts is quite the epic task: each poster takes about half an hour to run through the printer!
After almost two years of single-handed research, design, checking and cross-checking, I'm incredibly proud and thrilled to present my latest map project. It shows every single current and signed Interstate Highway and U.S. Highway in the contiguous 48 states in a style very similar to my previous Interstates as Subway Map and U.S. Highways as a Subway Map projects. Having made two separate maps that showed each type of road, I really had to at least try to combine them both into one map, didn't I?
Here’s a great old map of Los Angeles showing the already-booming rail transit network that was found in Los Angeles in the early days of the 20th Century. Electric trolleys first ran in LA in 1877, but the “Red Cars” of the Pacific Electric and the “Yellow Cars” of the narrow-gauge Los Angeles Railway had only appeared a mere five years before this map was produced. Their lines are represented on the map in appropriate […]
A beautifully rendered (just look at those lovingly drawn mountain ranges!) old-school map of the famous “Red Car” network at its absolute zenith. It was pretty much all downhill after this: real estate sales from land that had been opened up by the network (the real money that allowed the rail service to continue to run despite operating losses) began to decline and many rural services were converted to cheaper buses around this date. In the […]
Courtesy of the always amazing Big Map Blog (you really should follow them on Twitter), here’s an incredible birds-eye view of Chicago and its elevated railways from 1908. More than anything, I love the minute attention to detail on this – smoke curls from factory chimneys, almost every tree in the city’s parks seems to be present. Of particular note is the spur line out to Union Stock Yards, the self-proclaimed “butchery capital of the […]
Transit maps today are created on computer, and printed with advanced technology. We think nothing of using many different colours, adding a drop shadow behind type, adding a gradient to the background, transparency effects – all things that state-of-the-art design software makes perhaps a little too easy. As a contrast to these glitzy new-fangled maps, I present an antidote: a simply stunning, beautiful and ever-so-French map of the Paris Metro from 1956. It’s printed with […]
