Submitted by David, who says:
This all started about 17 years ago as an exercise to teach myself to use Macromedia Freehand. The years passed, Freehand became Adobe Illustrator, and I continued to work on it. The original Idea was to create an A4 sized map to carry around in my pocket, but it quickly became apparent that to contain the desired detail and remain legible it would have to be printed at A1 or A0.
Over time the development of smartphones and tablets was such that I found I no longer carried maps in my pocket, and that the concept of print size was no longer the issue used to be. I now have a version of this map in PDF format, with hotspots on the station names. The hotspots link to the TfL website and open the bus spider map for that station. I keep this on my iPad and iPhone and find it a very useful tool for planning journeys (it is however a big file at 19.2MB).
The brief I developed for myself was for the map to answer the following questions:
Primary questions – Can I get a train from here to there? If yes, do I have to change trains? If yes, where should I change?
Secondary questions – What fare zones will my journey cross, will my ticket be valid? Can access to trains be gained without using steps? Can I change trains without having to walk along the street on a cold wet night (this one comes from bitter personal experience)?
A major decision was to rotate the map by 22.5 degrees, which relates more closely to the real world orientation of the rail lines in London. It also made the placing of station names against station symbols more positive.
A basic design requirement was that the eye should be able to easily follow the lines across the map. To this end, a line should leave a station symbol directly opposite its point of entry, the use of an individual symbol for each line at each station helps in this also.
In addition the use of a symbol per line allows the inclusion of information about access and interchange between platforms.
Designing as a hobby without commercial constraints, the various routes are grouped into lines which make more sense of the service patterns for the traveller. The number of different lines tries to strike a balance between reducing clutter and conveying information about the available services.
Transit Maps says:
Designing a legible, attractive and usable diagram/map for all of greater London’s rail services has been a quest that many designers have set out upon over the years. Some – like this 1965 British Rail map – are quite successful; others perhaps a little less so. However, not many people have spent 17 years (off and on) refining their work like David has.
The end result is a rather marvellous rotated octolinear diagram – that is, a standard 90/45-degree diagram rotated 22.5 degrees counter-clockwise. David’s been kind enough to share a high resolution version of the diagram with me, and it looks great when you can soak in all the details. It’s not exactly compact – one wonders how David ever though he was going to get this to fit on an A4 sheet! – but a map of this complexity is really never going to be small.
David notes the obvious advantage of rotating the diagram in that horizontal labels nestle into the route lines very neatly. His claim that the rotation suits the geography of London better is a matter of opinion: London’s centre is a bit “blobby” and tends to follow the course of the Thames, so no one set of angles really fits everything. If nothing else, the rotated map just looks very striking, and that can’t be a bad thing.
The other big thing I noticed was David’s rather excellent zone bands. Unlike the official Tube Map, which has very wobbly zone boundaries that have to enclose full station names, David’s are very simple, almost properly concentric. He only encloses station symbols within zones and allows labels to cross over into adjacent zones. However, it’s still very obvious which stations belong to which zone. Top marks for this lovely piece of work, especially with the nastiness of the odd “Zone 2/3″ area to the east of the map.
In correspondence, David and I noticed that we had both independently hit upon very similar solutions for accessibility icons (blue dots and rings within station symbols) and Out-of-Station Interchanges (a thin black connecting line between station symbols instead of the Tube Map’s “dumbbell” connector). Both these solutions are fairly simple and obvious, so I’m not surprised that we did, but it’s always interesting to see this sort of thing.
A few oddities and trade-offs in the design: the Waterloo and City Line takes a surprisingly long and convoluted path between Waterloo and Bank. David’s use of a separate station symbol for every service means that some of the bigger mainline stations have a lot of symbols – Kings Cross St. Pancras has eight, Clapham Junction has seven, etc. I’m not sure about the pecking on the Edgware Road to Wimbledon branch of the District Line: that’s traditionally a technique used for mainline trains, but it does the job of differentiating it from the other District Line service, I guess. The exclusion of the Circle Line (David’s made it a branch of the Hammersmith & City) will be controversial to some.
However! Mornington Crescent is finally in the right place, huzzah!
Our rating: A large-format, information-rich map to savour at great length. A labour of love, tweaked and refined over a long, long period of time, and the results are worth it, I think. Four stars.