Here’s another beautiful old London Underground poster that features the Tube map, apparently produced to help servicemen unfamiliar with London get around. The poster, which basically acts as a Tube Map for Dummies guide, was placed next to the map in stations, with the abstract guard pointing towards it. The “tear-away” section at the bottom right shows a slightly modified version (angles aren’t at 45 degrees, the Aldwych spur is missing) of the central part of the map, which would have been the 1943 edition.
The artist was Polish-born Jan de Witt (1907-1991), signed as “Lewitt-Him” on the poster.
You just can’t beat 1930s London Underground posters – a superb mix of art, design and branding. This one’s a real beauty! Of interest is that it playfully echoes the look of Beck’s Tube Diagram, then only two years old. Design by O’Keeffe.
Painted by prolific transport poster artist Montague B. Black, this lovely poster shows the services of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) in England’s north east in 1934. The view stretches from Middlesborough all the up the Northumberland coast to the Scottish Borders and beyond. Each city is painted in imprecise but evocative detail, as is Hadrian’s Wall, shown stretching from Carlisle to Newcastle across the centre of the map. The late afternoon colour palette employed is particularly beautiful.
I’ve had a couple of requests to review this one, so here goes…
For me, this map is an excellent example of the overwhelming averageness of a lot of transit mapping here in the US. Yes, it does the job – you can work out how to get from here to there and where to make connections – but it’s just so completely bland and unmemorable.
Everything about the map seems to be completely generic, from the stock ESRI icons for airports and connecting services to the dull and tired Arial used for the labels. The beige background and thick, heavy black route line don’t help matters either. This is Florida here: how about some bright, sunny colours?
For me, the Tri-Rail logo itself suggests that the lovely blue in the central icon could be used as the colour for the main route line – the orange and green have already been used for the connecting Metrorail services, so why not continue with that colour theme and leverage the service’s branding a little more?
Speaking of the Tri-Rail logo, its placement in a white box within the blue header bar is awful – either reverse the logo out in white (if corporate standards allow) or put it on a light background. Similarly, the Interstate and U.S. Highway markers look odd when they’re contained in a white square.
A note regarding labelling: consistency is hugely important to produce an attractive map! Labels for the Metrorail services use all sorts of different sizes – “Douglas Road” is absolutely tiny compared to the other stations for no apparent reason. The names of the three counties that give Tri-Rail its “tri” are almost completely unreadable – light grey against a green/beige background and they also have a little offset drop shadow effect behind them that further obfuscates the text. Yes, this is subsidiary information, but it still needs to be readable.
On a more positive note, it’s nice to see that the map at least attempts to integrate services from different transit agencies, something I wish more maps that serve a large region would do.
Finally, examination of the PDF seems to suggest that this map was at least output from Microsoft Publisher: not a first-choice map/diagram design tool.
Our rating: Bland, dull and forgettable. Could easily be so much better and evocative of the area it serves. One-and-a-half stars.
Also see the similarly dull and unattractive Miami-Dade Metrorail map (Aug. 2012, 1 star). Florida doesn’t inspire great map design, apparently.
Sent my way via a comment left on the website regarding the woeful map of Szeged, Hungary (Sept. 2013, 0.5 stars), here’s another truly awful transit map from Hungary: this one from its second-largest city, Debrecen.
In short, it’s an absolute disaster.
Route lines branch off in any direction (no constraining angles to 45-degree increments for this bad boy!), while labels are jammed in wherever they can fit, at any old angle. The labelling is so bad, that the map has a large part of the legend at the bottom left devoted to defining abbreviations that are used in an attempt to shorten names to make them fit! At least none of the labels cut through route lines, but the means don’t justify the ends here.
Technically, even the curved parts of the route lines are actually short sections of straight paths that simulate a curve (badly), making me think that this has been put together in CAD software, rather than a design/illustration application.
The strangely subdued colour scheme (a lot of pastel pinks, purples and greys) doesn’t help matters either: there’s very little contrast between a lot of adjacent route lines, which makes following them difficult.
Almost apologetically, the text above the legend states: “Attention! Map not to scale.”
Our rating: An absolute eyesore. This style of map is fairly common for bus/tram networks in Europe, and can work when executed well (see Viteks Bariševs’ unofficial map of Riga, Latvia), but this is definitely not working at all. No stars.
Source:Official DKV site – also an “interactive” Flash-based version of the same map, and an SVG download if you want to open it up in Illustrator for some laughs
It all started when in Moscow was initiated a public tender for creation of a new, modern metro map. I was really excited and made an imaginary metro map for Florence (IRL there’s no metro).
But then I thought that I can do something really useful. A map for a real transport system that would be helpful, beautiful and clean.
I have completely redesigned the Milan Metro Map. I have added the latest updates with line M5, a grid with alphabetic list of stations, airports, I have created a new set of pictograms and packed them into a symbol font. I have created a completely new style that does not copy any other transport map in the world.
This map now has its own character, just like the city. The emphasis is put on the M lines however you can clearly understand how to use both M and S lines, how to get from point A to point B. The current official map just shows the S stations, it does not show to which line a station belongs.
I have excluded the regular railways (RFI) because they’re not a metropolitan transport.
Full project information and a PDF is here, free for download.
Transit Maps says:
Wow. This is absolutely beautiful work, and quite superior to the somewhat stuffy official map (March 2012, 3.5 stars).
Dmitry hits the nail on the head when he says this map now has a character that’s unique to the city, and its a look that feels appropriate for fashion-conscious, forward-looking Milan. Everything here is created especially for this map: the lovely custom icons, the square-yet-round station markers, and the stunning ribbon-like effect used for the suburban rail lines, which has a lovely rhythmical flow to it. Even the slight checkerboarding pattern used for the grid (alternating squares are tinted a little darker) – which could look clumsy if not handled well – is handled deftly and subtly.
Our rating: Hand-crafted excellence that suits its target city perfectly. 5 stars.
P.S. Seriously, are Russians the best transit map designers at the moment or what? This beautiful piece, Michael Kvrivishvili’s contest-winning MBTA map and Lebedev Studio’s Moscow Metro redesign. All such beautiful work and something for other designers to aspire to.
Well, thank goodness this never eventuated. Can you imagine an elevated monorail running down the length of Market Street?
From a 1952 San Francisco Public Utilities Commission report entitled Rapid Transit for San Francisco: Monorail, Elevated, Subway? A Report of Possibilities.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever been so completely, madly and totally in love with a transit map as I am with this. A giant, sprawling, isometric representation of much of Japan showing JR Group railway lines. The map is produced by the JR West company, and its operating area is shown in full detail within the green area (apart from the heavily urbanised areas around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, where – wisely – not all stations are shown). Connecting services and routes operated outside the JR West area are also shown, but in less detail – only major stations along the routes are indicated. Shinkansen lines are light blue, JR West main line routes are dark blue (main line routes outside their operating area match the company that operates in that area – red for JR Kyushu, for example), while urban routes seem to follow their established colour-coding.
As can be seen from the two detail images from the area around Osaka, there’s both an English and Japanese version of the map. The Japanese version is arguably more effective because of the in-built ability to set the text vertically, but the English version isn’t half bad either. I particularly like the way the line names have been set to conform to the isometric grid – a very nice design touch.
Our rating: I like to imagine that this is the world map from some incredible railroad-building computer game. 5 stars!
At first glance, this appears to be a basic map outlining tram and trolleybus routes within Shanghai’s International Settlement, dated December 1939. It’s only when you read the legend that you start to realise the greater historical context of this map.
The statement that accompanies the dotted route lines in the legend simply states “No service in operation at present due to circumstances beyond the company’s control” – an massive understatement of the volatile situation in Shanghai at that time.
It’s just two years after the brutal Battle of Shanghai, and the Chinese parts of the city outside the International Settlement and French Concession are fully occupied by invading Japanese forces. Fighting between the Japanese and Chinese revolutionaries often spilled over the (supposedly neutral) settlements’ borders, which probably explains the reluctance of the transit company to guarantee service.
In 1941, the Japanese army entered and occupied the International Settlement in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor – the long-running Sino-Japanese war was now absorbed into the Pacific front of World War II.
Our rating: Not an amazing map of itself, but the history that it hints at is fascinating and deserves to be better known. 5 stars!
A detail of a city-wide map showing the approximate limits of the historical centre of Milan. I’m guessing that this is located in or near the Duomo Metro station, based on the way that the map is worn away at that point – as I’ve mentioned before, many users will actually point to their starting location on a map as they trace their intended route.
The thick green/yellow/red lines are the Metro, blue lines are the tram and brown/maroon lines would be buses. Numbers in circles show route termini; numbers in squares allow you to follow a route from point to point.
The area shown here is actually easily walkable without the use of public transport, unless you’re in a hurry, I guess!
