Here’s an interesting diagrammatic bus-only map from Ljubljana, the capital and largest city of Slovenia in Central Europe. Completely diagrammatic bus maps are a fairly rare breed, as users often want to be able to see exactly where the routes go along roads. Because of this, geographical maps and slightly simplified geographical maps tend to be the most popular forms of bus map. In this case, the small number of routes, the small size of Ljubljana itself and the defining geography of the rivers through the city help this map work relatively well.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: Very abstract route map for a bus-only network: for the most part it works well, mainly because of the way that the two rivers (the Sava to the north, and the Ljubljanica to the south) help to define the extent of the city.Routes are fairly easy to follow, with termini being called out well. Unusually but effectively, weekday, weekend and night services are all featured on the one map, with colour-coding and route numbering grouping the similar routes together.

Nice typography for the station labels – Erik Spiekermann’s FF Info Display type family is used effectively here, although we’ll get to less successful typography in the next section…

The combined bus stop/direction of travel icon is something I haven’t seen used a lot, and it actually works fairly well, albeit less so where the route line is dashed when everything gets a little busy.

What we don’t like: While FF Info Display is a very nicely-chosen typeface, that can’t be said about some other choices. The stolid, angular Bank Gothic used to denote parts of the city is totally at odds with the soft, humanist touches of FF Info, especially in the map title to the top right of the map (where there’s also a typo in the word “public”, although fortunately not the Really Bad One).

Even worse is the obvious later addition of text at the bottom right, set in Microsoft Tahoma! Quite clearly, changes were made to the map by people without access to the original fonts and the map suffers greatly because of it.

The light blue fill of the Sava River to the north has been accidentally moved to the left relative to its dark blue outline, giving the effect of a thick border on one side and a thin/non-existent border on the other.

Our rating: A solid, if not spectacular, diagrammatic bus route map, let down by some poor typographical choices and some lazy revisions. Two-and-a-half stars.

Source: Official LPP website – link no longer active