Submitted by Frederico, who says:
This is a diagram for a fantasy network serving my hometown, Vitória, Brazil – my first try designing a transit map.
If you showed this to a local, they would laugh at you – that’s because the city doesn’t have any type of rapid transit (not even bus lanes), even though it has almost 2 million habitants. The local government has been promising a BRT system more or less following the blue, orange and purple lines routes on this map for years, but it never went beyond a project. For most locals, a subway line is really impossible to imagine becoming real in a lifetime. So I thought I could bring this kind of utopia to the diagram and tried to give it a tongue-in-cheek feel using modular elements and childish colors.
This project also has a funny story behind it. I started concepting it 2 years ago, right after I returned from a trip to Lisbon, Portugal. I was in the middle of a depression, and on this trip I got to know some internet friends I have had since 2006 and really fell in love with the city and its “big city but suburban heart” sense. As you can imagine, my depression got even worse when I went back home, and when you are so dissatisfied about your life you can’t help but imagining a reality that is different in every aspect.
That’s when the idea of this map came through. One of the aspects of my life I thought that could be different was my commute: going to and back from work by bus, I imagined how my trip would be if my city had a subway, and even thinking of the voice of the Lisbon Metro announcing the names of the stations that a Vitória subway would have.
One of my other inspirations was the Los Angeles Metro identity. Their new designation system helped me identify the problems of color-based line naming and inspired me to create a system with different shapes for each type of service (bus, subway, ferry etc) and a different icon for each line, without using letters for designation which I find kind of boring.
I first started drawing a draft of the network on Paint (!), then switched to Illustrator and drew on top of a (terrible) map of the city I found on the city hall’s website. My main inspiration was, of course, Lisbon – I wasn’t really inspired to create anything at the time so I just tried to apply Lisbon’s metro map elements to mine. Most of them are still present here, such as the typeface, iconography and subway lines and its stations dots.
As I improved my designing abilities, I started changing the map to my taste, and eventually it became a diagram. I think I still suck on Illustrator, though, and if you edit the pdf you can see that it has many patches and shapes with wrong points that I didn’t know how to fix and ended up just putting a square on top to hide it. That was also one of the reasons why I chose to use this modular and squarey design: I didn’t have the patience to draw rounded curves on the angles!
Looking back on the last two years, much changed: me and my friend who I met in Lisbon started dating long-distance, and eventually I moved here to live with him. So, maybe I also tried to put in this diagram the thing that really summarize my last two years: the feeling of being divided between two cities and trying to combine them two. I know… it’s a stupid thing to try to project into a transit map 🙂
Well, I hope you enjoy it, and sorry for the very long text. And thank you for this blog, it really has been a great inspiration for me.
Transit Maps says:
Sometimes, the story behind a map is perhaps even more interesting than the map itself. On the face of it, Frederico’s fantasy map is a pretty standard reworking of the design themes of the well-known Lisbon Metro diagram (which I wrote about way, way back in November 2011), with a few elements of the LA Metro map added to distinguish between modes.
(Interestingly, Frederico has got his hands on a copy of the Lisbon Metro’s bespoke typeface, Metrolis, which certainly helps complete the illusion.)
However, it’s the meaning behind this work that makes it special, a juxtaposition of two places and the memories of each. It’s a very personal piece and that far outweighs the way the map might look.