Great little slice of history here. The photographer on Flickr seems to recall the cost of a token as being 60 cents at the time; Wikipedia prices it at $1.15.
As a graphic designer, all I can see is the terrible registration in the (cheap) printing – look at the huge yellow halo bleeding out to the right of the green and red printed areas. (In four-colour printing, green is made from combining cyan and yellow inks, red is made from magenta and yellow. When the plates are poorly aligned with each other, the presses run too fast, or cheap paper stretches or moves during the printing process, you get misalignment of the inks, leading to poor registration like this.)
EDIT: As has been pointed out to me, the tokens and the map shown in the photo aren’t contemporaneous. The “solid brass” token shown here was used from 1980 to 1985; during that time, the cost of a subway ride rose from 60 cents to 90 cents. (Source: nycsubway.org’s comprehensive page on subway tokens)
Is it scary that this actually looks incredibly plausible? There’s even a Circle Line that mirrors the beltway rather nicely. Great fun! Map by Chris Nelson.
I absolutely love this now-and-then snapshot of what is now the busiest subway system in the world. The picture on the left is from the first edition of Lonely Planet’s guide to China in 1984; the one on the right is from the 13th edition, released this year. That’s only a 29 year gap – quite astounding!
Source: two tweets from Daniel McCrohan, a writer for Lonely Planet’s China and Beijing guides. 1984 and 2013.
Oh, those crazy Japanese! Still, one can’t help but think that Douglas Adams – whose 61st birthday would have been two days ago – would have approved. Because, after all, a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Especially one with a railway map on it.
Long time readers will be aware of my low opinion of the Washington DC Metro Rail map – here’s a fairly scathing review of the “Rush+” map (March 2012, 2.5 stars) to refresh your memory.
It looks like WMATA is preparing for the opening of the Silver Line and has put a draft version of a new map up for comments. According to the blurb there, the route lines are now thinner and station names are now treated more consistently. The other obvious visual change is the introduction of a new station symbol (one with thin “whisker” extensions) to accommodate the three routes that will now run across the middle of the map. Let’s discuss all of these in turn.
The route lines may be thinner, but only barely. Probably not enough to make any useful difference to the map. While the playful thickness of the route lines are very much an identifying feauture of the WMATA map, it’s now becoming a liability to its usefulness. The extra space required to accommodate the Silver Line through Foggy Bottom and Farragut West means that the six stations on the northwest leg of the Red Line inside the District have to be crammed into a ridiculously tight space – far tighter than anywhere else on the map. I always feel that a diagrammatic map like this has to strive for even and harmonious spacing across the entire map… and this map simply doesn’t do that well any more.
The new treatment of station names includes “consistent street abbreviations across the map”, which should be a good thing: it’s always better to choose either “Avenue” or “Ave” and stick with that choice across the whole map. However, “Hgts” is a visually awful abbreviation for “Heights” and is included for the sole purpose of making “Columbia Hgts” fit on one line without conflicting with the “Van Ness-UDC” label. “Ctr” is an equally terrible abbreviation for “Center”, and doesn’t actually seem to bring any real space-saving benefits to the map.
The new “whiskered” station symbol just feels forced and unnecessary to me. It introduces a third station symbol, even though hierarchically, it means exactly the same as the plain station circle that already exists. An elongated “pill” symbol with the same cap radius as the normal circle would work a lot better in my opinion. Or – narrow down the route lines until the normal circle symbol can touch all three.
At the moment, this map is only a work in progress, but I’m not exactly impressed by any of the new design decisions.
Vignelli-inspired map (designer unknown) of the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Roads. On display until March 15th at the New York Transit Museum’s exhibit Grand By Design, on the centennial of Grand Central Terminal.
Transit Maps says:
Designer unknown? The amazing book “Helvetica and the New York City Subway” attributes this map to one Joan Charysyn, saying she designed it freelance in between stints at Vignelli Associates and Unimark. It’s my understanding that the map was designed to be part of a three-map system (commuter rail, subway, and locality map) that was meant to be displayed at every station. However, the scheme (much to Massimo Vignelli’s constant disgust) never really eventuated.
To my mind, this map isn’t quite as successful as Vignelli’s subway map, mainly because the Long Island RR is one uniform blue throughout, meaning the map provides very little in the way of routing information. This is probably fine for regular commuters, who know which train they need to catch, but isn’t so great for non-regular users of the system. It’s still a fine example of early 1970s transit map design, and is obviously the inspiration for this modern map (Jan 2013, 4.5 stars) of the Metro-North lines that I’ve featured previously.
To be honest, this is a pretty small category and I’m only including it for completeness’ sake.
Included in this category are san serif fonts that don’t fall into any of the three major categories, veering more towards the decorative or ornamental. Examples of this include the Madrid Metro’s severe, squared off typeface (that matches the aesthetics of the map almost perfectly), and the similar, but less successful, square font that was once used in Naples. Most famously of all, there’s also Lance Wyman’s custom Tipo Metro font for the Mexico City Metro.
Use of an unusual typeface like these needs to be considered very carefully: while they can give your map its own unique look, they can also date very quickly as design trends and fashions change.
The last typeface I want to share with you is that rarest of beasts: a serif font. Of all the maps I’ve featured on Transit Maps, the Tyne & Wear Metro is the only one that has serifs used on the labels on the map itself. It helps that it’s a beautiful slab serif face, both designed by and named after the famous Margaret Calvert. If anyone can find another example of a serif font on a transit map, let me know!
The third – and most diverse – category of sans serif typefaces is known as humanist sans. Compared to the grotesque and geometric categories, humanist sans typefaces almost calligraphic, with a natural variation in line weight and open characters that enhance legibility. With less “rules” to their construction, there’s a much greater variety of letter forms – meaning it’s easier to find a typeface that projects its own unique personality upon your map, which can be good to give that vital sense of “place” to your map and help it stand out from the crowd.
One of the most popular humanist sans serif fonts used in transit map design is Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta – I’ve featured examples from Zurich, Vancouver, BC and Rio de Janeiro, which does some terrible things to a lovely typeface.
(You actually can’t go wrong with most of Spiekermann’s sans serif typefaces, as many of them were specifically designed for wayfinding or road signage.)
Frutiger – originally designed as a wayfinding typeface for Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport in 1968 – is also popular, and is used here by Auckland and Rotterdam.
Adobe’s Myriad Pro is also used quite a lot: it has a lot of weights and widths, so it’s very versatile. Hong Kong’s MTR uses it, and I’ve used it pretty extensively in my own maps.
As well as these commercially available fonts, many transit agencies use their own custom typefaces that are humanist sans serif. The London Underground’s Johnston Sans is probably the most famous of these, although I see it as a geometric/humanist hybrid, rather than a true humanist sans. Other custom humanist sans include the Paris Metro’s Parisine, and the similarly named Brusseline for Brussels’ Metro system.
Geometric sans serif typefaces – as their name suggests – are based on geometrical shapes, especially circles for their “o”. Many of these typefaces have their roots in the 1920s and 1930s, and often reflect the Art Deco aesthetic of that period.
Of the three sans serif categories, this is my least favourite for use on transit maps. Their rigid reliance on geometry makes them a little inflexible in use, and because many of the characters are so wide, the x-height is almost always small. This contributes to that Art Deco feel, but doesn’t help legibility very much. In general, the condensed versions of geometric sans typefaces don’t match their standard variants very well, as the “perfect circle” of the round letterforms has to be sacrificed in order to achieve condensation.
Use of geometric sans serifs on transit maps include: Avant Garde Condensed on the Dallas DART map, Geometric 415 on the Maryland MTA map (actually works pretty well), Futura on Atlanta’s MARTA map, and Futura Condensed on this Freiburg im Breisgau map.
If you really need an Art Deco vibe to your map, then you could use a geometric sans, but I’d stay clear otherwise.
