Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to post until the New Year, but I couldn’t wait to show this exciting new map of transit in Kiev, Ukraine.

This beautiful diagram was designed by Igor Skliarevsky in his own time, simply because he was frustrated with the limitations and design of the official map. As he says on his website (pardon the Google Translate from Ukrainian), “As a designer, I find it difficult to put up with inconvenience and ugliness of things that surround me.” As this was the main reason I designed my integrated transit map of Portland, Oregon, I definitely agree with Igor on that front.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: Lovely minimalist transit map design with a very elegant flowing feel. I particularly like the curved lines that join different transit modes and the subtle gradients between the coloured circles at transit stations. Fantastic hierarchy: the Metro is most important/largest, then light rail, then commuter rail. Yellow informational icons stand out well – an advantage of a system that doesn’t use every colour for its route lines! Plenty of lovely white space, even though all text is duplicated (in Ukrainian and a transliteration).

What we don’t like: A few tiny errors here and there. “Ploscha” is capitalised in Kontraktova Ploscha, but Poshtova ploscha – directly underneath – is not. Type on the commuter rail lines seems a little too small in comparison to the Metro lines. I feel that the terminus cap where the T2 and T1 lines end should be purple, so each of the three light rail lines gets to be a terminal cap colour – at the moment, orange is used twice (also at the T1/T3 terminal). The QR code may be useful, but boy, does it ruin the minimalist aesthetics of the map!

Our rating: Igor is certainly to be commended for this excellent effort, a gorgeous map indeed. Four-and-a-half stars!

Source: Wayfinding Kiev website – link no longer active