A few people have requested this recently-introduced “simplified” Metro map from Spain’s capital, so here goes…

Introduced with much fanfare earlier this month, this new version of the Madrid Metro map is aimed solely at visiting tourists, showing where all the main zones and points of interest are in relation to the comprehensive subway system.

This kind of map is hardly unique — London has had a central city bus map showing points of interest for years now (Feb 2012, 3.5 stars) — and this is not one of the more successful efforts in my eye. The Metro lines themselves are laid out clearly enough, in nice smooth, friendly, looping lines and the stations and main interchanges are easy to enough find. But the rest of the map just seems to be trying way too hard to be casual and inviting, with a weird clash of visual styles and typography.

There are some nice touches here and there — the scratchily-illustrated waves in the lakes are quite lovely — but there’s a lot that just looks slapdash as well. The illustrations for the points of interest look like run-of-the-mill clip art, with no real unique style (compare to the buildings on the London map, which are beautifully and uniformly drawn). The eight “zones of interest” could really use some colour-coding to differentiate them from each other, and the default Adobe Illustrator “scribble” effect used to shade them just looks weak.

The typography veers from trying too hard (the hipster hand-drawn block heading typfeace) to the downright ugly (is that condensed Comic Sans that’s being used to label the points of interest?).

Our rating: It does the job, I guess, but could have been so much more with a little more attention to detail and craftsmanship. Two stars.

Source: Redtransporte.com