Submitted by Owain, who says:

Love your blog. I’d really like to get your thoughts and, of course, a rating on a transit map I have created using Adobe Photoshop. It is for a fictional brand I have created called ‘neo’ (North East Overground) which ties together real express bus routes which radiate from Newcastle opon Tyne. The bus routes I have tied together under the ‘neo’ banner are a hotchpotch of different operators, ticketing and timetables, so my aim for the map was one single cohesive brand which hopefully screams simplicity.

Transit Maps says:

This is very clean and legible, Owain – nicely done! Some obvious influences would seem to be the Newcastle Metro map (the grey circle indicating the city centre) and the Manchester tram map (ticks coming out of station circles to point at labels), but you’ve given everything your own twist as well so it doesn’t look derivative. The nested curves where the “C” and “D” lines diverge in Newcastle could be drawn a little better, but everything else looks very technically sound.

The various rivers are a great way to divide the map up into regions and to quickly show the scale of the network, though I think I’d like to see curves where the River Wear changes direction, rather than hard 90-degree angles.

A legend for the symbols would be handy: you should always make everything on a map explicit, instead of assuming people know what each icon means. And although I think the map overall is great, it does take up a lot of vertical space: I think that a more compact version would be very interesting to see.

Our final word: There’s a stop called “Pity Me”! Executed nicely in a style that plays nicely with the existing Metro branding, though I think it could be compressed into a more convenient shape as an alternate version.

See: Owain’s Behance project page