Submitted by Travertine Libertine.
Transit Maps says:
Created by Matthew Somerville.
Totally hypnotic after a while as all those little yellow train dots start racing around (it kind of reminds me of a mash-up between the Scotland Yard board game and the original Railroad Tycoon). Childhood reminiscing done, it really is amazing what can be done with raw data pulled via an API these days. Stuff like this is the future of transit information.
As a graphic designer with a keen interest in transit maps and a fairly thorough knowledge of their history and usage, I thought I had a decent understanding of Massimo Vignelli’s diagrammatic version of the New York Subway map, which was used from 1972 to 1979.
This outstanding book has proved me almost completely and utterly wrong.
So much of what we think we know about the Vignelli map is simply hearsay and legend, repeated Chinese whisper-style across the internet, until we’re left with something that almost, but not quite, resembles the truth. Fueled by excellent research and interviews, and presented with beautiful (if occasionally a little small) maps, photos and illustrations, this book is essential for any lover of transit maps and good graphic design.
More than anything else I’ve read, this book places the Vignelli map in a proper historical context – what preceded it and why that left the door open for a modernist design firm (rather than cartographers) to produce something new, but also what led to its abrupt and premature death in 1979. There’s definitely more to the story than the usual “New Yorkers didn’t like a diagram/square Central Park/beige water” reasons that you often hear.
As well as a thorough analysis of the map itself – reproductions and accompanying text are presented for every version of the map – the book also delves deeply into the labour-intensive and time-consuming production methods required to create a map as complex as this in the days before computer-aided design. Asked to come up with an initial conceptual “trial map” in 1970, junior designer Joan Charysyn (who also independently created this New York Commuter Rail diagram in 1974) had to hand-cut pieces of PANTONE colour film into 1/8″ strips and then assemble the route lines onto a one-foot-square board, adding station label type as well. Of the work, Charysyn simply states, “the execution of the comp was tedious and done in as few pieces as possible.”
The book also deals with Vignelli’s work for the Washington, DC Metro: he designed the wayfinding and station signage that is still largely in use today, but the contract for the system map was given separately to Lance Wyman. The book shows some of Vignelli’s very early (and very minimalist!) conceptual sketches for the map, and explains exactly why Lance Wyman’s proposed station icons (similar to the ones he had designed for Mexico City’s Metro) never got off the ground.
The book also discusses the reintroduction of the Vignelli map in 2008, comparing and contrasting it against the other modern player in the New York Subway map market – Eddie Jabbour’s Kick Map (Jabbour writes a preface for the book, and his admiration for Vignelli’s design philosophy and body of work is obvious).
This book is absolutely essential for any lover or student of transit maps or graphic design. It’s well written, thoroughly researched and beautiful to look at: what more do you need? Five stars!
Published by RIT Press, December 2012. 128pp.
Purchase on Amazon here (affiliate link – Transit Maps receives a small commission on each copy purchased via this link)
Note: Transit Maps purchased their own copy of this book, and did not receive any compensation for this review, financial or otherwise.
Here’s the latest “Mario Map” from the incredibly prolific Dave Delisle (seriously, how much cool stuff can one guy pump out?). This one is of my home town of Portland, Oregon, and Dave actually enlisted my help in checking the accuracy of the route layouts and the spelling of the station names. Considering the ridiculous length of some of the station names in the system and the limitations of the 8-bit art style, Dave’s done a great job at fitting everything together in a very plausible and attractive manner.
Of course, in true Portlandia style, Dave has literally “put a bird on it” – there’s also a non-birdified version over on his website if you don’t get the joke. Also of note is Dave’s playful take on the TriMet logo, and the fact that our princess seems to be stuck out at Expo Center, the poor thing.
Source: Dave’s website – posters are for sale!
A lovely little slice of Tokyo life, complete with a very compact but informative strip map for the Yamanote Line: current station, connecting services (both in two languages), and estimated time to other stations on the line. It’s basically the analogue version of the digital map that’s on the trains themselves, as seen in this post.
Source: tokyoform/Flickr
The whole map is a bit of a mess, with all sorts of random angles everywhere (both route lines and station labels), but what really takes this map into the land of the bizarre are the big photos of trains superimposed over it. It’s like someone said, “Hey, there’s a bit of white space left over – what can we fill it up with? I know! How about some shots of our trains, and we’ll rotate them so it looks like they’re travelling along the tracks? That’s a great idea!”
NOT. One-and-a-half stars.
Source: szogun000/Flickr
For those of who you missed it, Transit Maps did a quick little Q&A over the weekend with the amazing Spanish design magazine and blog, Yorokobu. (Seriously, go take a look, even if you don’t speak Spanish. Totally inspiring!)
Anyway, for those of you that don’t speak Spanish (like me) and can’t/won’t use a web translation service, here’s my original answers to their questions in English. It may differ slightly to what was published because of editing, but it’s substantially the same.
My love of transit maps really began on my first visit to London in 1997. As a graphic designer, I was fascinated to see just how deeply embedded in the fabric of the city the Tube Map was: it was known and loved by just about everyone, and I certainly found it useful for navigating around an unfamiliar city. I bought a book from the London Transport Museum about it, “Mr. Beck’s Undergound Map”, and immersed myself in it. The history behind the Tube Map is quite fascinating, and it is amazing to see how it has evolved with the growing system, but still stayed true to its origins.
After that, I began dabbling with making my own maps, and have picked up quite a bit of attention over the internet for them in recent years, especially for my maps of the U.S. Interstate System and U.S. Highway system in the style of a metro map.
The London Underground map (an easy choice) – the forefather of almost every transit map in the world. If I had to pick one absolute favourite version of it, I’d have to go with this unpublished Harry Beck version from 1961 that shows the then-planned Victoria line as a beautifully straight line.
Massimo Vignelli’s 1970s New York Subway Diagram is another beautiful piece of design, although I actually prefer the modern revival as seen on the MTA Weekender site. It’s still got the clean, minimalist look of the original, but the modern route line colours work a lot better. It’s the epitome of paring back unnecessary information to only show what’s really important: where to get on, where to transfer, and where to get off.
My third favourite map is a bit of an oddball – the S- and U-Bahn map from Stuttgart in around 2000. It’s presented isometrically, which is something I’ve never seen anywhere else, and it works very effectively. I’ve always had a soft spot for this one – details like the subtle three-dimensionality on the Hauptbahnhof (main railway station) really make this something out of the ordinary.
In Spain, an honourable mention to the Barcelona Metro map (especially in conjunction with the excellent wayfinding system at the stations), but I’m not such a huge fan of Madrid’s recent strictly rectangular map.
A good transit map has to give the end user (the transit rider) the information they need to get from Point A to Point B, and it needs to do it quickly and effectively. Information hierarchy is paramount – the most important information (such as station names and route information) always needs to stand out clearly. Supporting information (connecting bus routes or hours of operation, for example) should be lower in the hierarchy – it’s there if you need it, but it shouldn’t distract from the main focus of the map.
Consideration for colour-blind users is important as well: there should always be good contrast between route lines that run closely together, so that they can be easily distinguished and followed by all users.
And if it can be beautiful as well, that’s just the icing on the cake!
Plenty! Many smaller transit agencies don’t have much of a budget for map development, and try to produce their own maps internally without the specialist design knowledge it takes to create a truly useful and attractive map.
Others are simply reaching the end of their useful lifespan – I believe that the Washington, DC Metro map’s distinctive “fat” route lines are now unsustainable with the upcoming addition of the new Silver Line route – or are guilty of trying to cram too much information into a single map: the current New York subway map is a good example of this: there are callout boxes and extraneous text covering just about every pit of spare space on that map.
I work as a graphic designer for a multinational civil engineering firm, so I get to see the “behind the scenes” look at the origination of a lot of transit-oriented projects. We do a lot of work with light rail, streetcar and bus rapid transit (BRT), so it’s fascinating to see the thought processes behind this type of work. Making my own transit maps is something I do on the side, although I feel my design is better informed because of the work I do in my day job. Recently, I also helped with the beta testing of Kick Map’s new London Underground iPhone app, which was an awesome thing to be involved with. Their “hybrid” style of mapping – diagrammatic, but with a healthy nod to the actual geography of the area being mapped – works very well on a device with a small screen like the iPhone.
Absolutely! There are multiple companies here in the U.S. who do nothing but design transit maps and wayfinding systems, and some of them do fantastic work as well.
Harry Beck – the original designer of the London Underground map. While he certainly didn’t develop the idea of a diagrammatic transit map in complete isolation (there is similar contemporary work by other designers both in England and Germany), his work did popularise what we now consider to be the template for almost every transit map. Of modern transit map designers, Massimo Vignelli (NY subway) and Erik Spiekermann’s (Berlin’s post-reunification S- and U-Bahn map) importance cannot be denied. Spiekermann’s continued work with typefaces optimised for transit and wayfinding purposes increases his importance to designers.
The simple answer to is ask them to start designing one and see how well they do. Once you start explaining all the variables and objectives and how they all have to balance out to create a useful, aesthetically-pleasing final piece, people get the idea pretty quickly. Part of running the Transit Maps blog is definitely the “education” aspect of it. Not all transit maps are created equal, and I present my opinions (no matter how brutal they might be) so that readers can start for make their own informed decisions about how graphic design affects their lives every day.
All the time! I’ve already produced some very popular unofficial redesigns of the Washington, DC Metro map, Boston’s “T” map, and that of my home town, Portland, Oregon. The Washington, DC map won the readers’ vote (and came second in the juried voting) in a contest on the Greater Greater Washington website a couple of years ago. I keep my eyes out for other maps that could use a redesign…
I think we’re already starting to see a shift away from paper to digital. New York’s just about to install interactive map kiosks at a number of subway stations, Paris already has them, and smart phone/iPad map applications (like Kick Map NY and London) are becoming more popular and useful every day. Personally, I love the feel of a printed map in my hands, but digital definitely seems to be the way of the future.
Here’s an absolutely charming little map found on the inside of a French model train set box lid. I don’t have a definitive date for this, but it does have a lovely retro feel to it.
The map itself isn’t much help, as it’s pretty much a work of fiction: a weird combination of different parts of the Orient Express’s historical routes (see this diagram on Wikipedia) and a branch to Warsaw via Prague that was never part of the train’s itinerary.
Maybe, as simple artwork intended for a children’s toy, the designers were simply thinking that no one would notice any inaccuracies. Looks great, though!
Source: japanese forms/Flickr
Submitted by Peter, who says:
Hello! I’m very much new to Illustrator, but I have a love of transit and a budding love of graphic design, and reading your wonderful blog has inspired me to try and pick it up. For practice, I tried turning one of my childhood daydreams into reality — a hypothetical map for a light rail system for my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville is a notoriously anti-transit town with just a subpar bus system to its name, and it would be great if I could possibly use this map to start some dialogue back home and get people thinking about the possibility again. Any suggestions for improving either the map or the system idea itself (if you’re familiar with Louisville) would be greatly appreciated!
Transit Maps says:
Not being familiar with Louisville at all, I can’t really comment much on your ideas behind the system, except to say that it looks plausible — if expensive — to build.
The map itself is a solid, workmanlike effort. I like the slightly unusual use of 30/60-degree angles, which seems to fit the actual layout of the city well (at least, from what a quick look at Google Maps tells me), and the general design is fairly clean and uncluttered.
I think the number of directional arrows you use in the downtown area is overkill — use either station icons with arrows or arrows between the stations, not both. If you do use arrows between stations, I really don’t think you need an arrow between every station: one strategically located along each straight section of track should be enough to remind your users which way they’re going. There’s also an error with the arrow on 2nd Avenue between Oak and Magnolia: it should point north, not south.
I find the Interstates are a little too light to make them out easily, and they could perhaps be handled a little more stylishly and also simplified more. The jog in I-65 north of I-264 seems a little unnecessarily detailed to me.
Here’s a few questions for you to consider:
Do we actually need to see the runways at the airport? What benefit does showing them give the users of the map?
Would showing the northern bank of the river give a little more geographic context? I find that it looks more like a lake at present. Could you simplify its shape by using the same 30/60 degree angles used elsewhere? This could bring a unifying design element to the map.
How can you make your station labeling more consistent? I’ve never really been a huge fan of multiple angles to make things fit. Your map is very open and spacious, there could be other alternative ways of doing it.
Finally, “Home of the Innocents” is possibly the most awesome name for a light rail stop ever.
An interactive metro map from North Korea’s secretive capital. The green buttons across the bottom of the map represent all the stations: press one and the path from your current station to your destination lights up. With just a handful of stations on two lines (and only one interchange), I hardly think many people are going to be overwhelmed by the system’s complexity.
Wikipedia’s article on the Pyongyang Metro is actually a very interesting read: the stations are mostly named thematically (Comrade, Enlightenment, Three Rejuvenations, etc.), while accounts vary as to exactly how many stations foreign visitors to the city can visit – whatever the final number, it seems that they’re mostly limited to the newer, more impressive stations.
Source: Claude1688/Flickr
A rather lovely (and somewhat prescient) figure from a report prepared by the New York engineering firm of Jacobs & Davies for the City of Toronto in 1910. It shows plans for a system of “subway streetcars” – a combination of at-grade and subterranean routes – both ahead of its time and prohibitively expensive, especially for a modest city like Toronto at the time (which had a population of just 350,000).
Source: levyrapidtransit.ca via @bgilliard
