From the now sadly defunct “Stickers on the Central Line” Tumblr, are these hilarious and superbly executed “prank” stickers found on the London Underground. Matching the original strip map almost exactly, they instead insert something unexpected, pointed, or just plain funny.
My favourite? Change at Tottenham Court Road for a submarine to Somalia, complete with a very plausible London Underground submarine icon.
More here in this imgur album. Hat tip to Twitter user Ben Darfler.
Here’s a fine piece of mid-1970s transit map design, showing Boston’s extensive commuter rail network. Its style is definitely in line with other North American maps of this period, including this one of Philadelphia’s SEPTA system from 1980 – sharp lines and clean typography were the order of the day back then, it seems.
Have we been there? I’ve been to Boston, but haven’t used the commuter rail system.
What we like: Clean, clear and simple. The use of the subway lines to show the extent of Boston itself is nicely handled – and even though it’s very graphically simple, there’s a couple of nice touches: the notch in the Red Line to show where the Mattapan line begins, and the thinning of the route lines for the street-running parts of the Green Line.
What we don’t like: Perhaps a missed opportunity to better indicate connections to the subway, especially at North Station, where the Green and Orange Lines both connect. As it is, it looks equally likely that the Blue Line also has a connection at North Station. However, as this is a commuter rail map, this is a minor consideration.
Some spacing issues with stations on the Rockport Line – it may be more accurate, but cramps up some names a bit too much.
Our rating: I really enjoy the simple, stark nature of mid-1970s maps, and feel there’s a lot of lessons that can be learned by current designers from them. Less can be more. Four stars.
Additional: Here’s what the same map looked like by the mid-1980s.
Source: jimboyle93/Flickr
Nice shallow depth of field, but was he holding the camera up way over his head to get this point of view?
Source: Cormac Phelan/Flickr
Here’s an interesting diagrammatic bus-only map from Ljubljana, the capital and largest city of Slovenia in Central Europe. Completely diagrammatic bus maps are a fairly rare breed, as users often want to be able to see exactly where the routes go along roads. Because of this, geographical maps and slightly simplified geographical maps tend to be the most popular forms of bus map. In this case, the small number of routes, the small size of Ljubljana itself and the defining geography of the rivers through the city help this map work relatively well.
Have we been there? No.
What we like: Very abstract route map for a bus-only network: for the most part it works well, mainly because of the way that the two rivers (the Sava to the north, and the Ljubljanica to the south) help to define the extent of the city.Routes are fairly easy to follow, with termini being called out well. Unusually but effectively, weekday, weekend and night services are all featured on the one map, with colour-coding and route numbering grouping the similar routes together.
Nice typography for the station labels – Erik Spiekermann’s FF Info Display type family is used effectively here, although we’ll get to less successful typography in the next section…
The combined bus stop/direction of travel icon is something I haven’t seen used a lot, and it actually works fairly well, albeit less so where the route line is dashed when everything gets a little busy.
What we don’t like: While FF Info Display is a very nicely-chosen typeface, that can’t be said about some other choices. The stolid, angular Bank Gothic used to denote parts of the city is totally at odds with the soft, humanist touches of FF Info, especially in the map title to the top right of the map (where there’s also a typo in the word “public”, although fortunately not the Really Bad One).
Even worse is the obvious later addition of text at the bottom right, set in Microsoft Tahoma! Quite clearly, changes were made to the map by people without access to the original fonts and the map suffers greatly because of it.
The light blue fill of the Sava River to the north has been accidentally moved to the left relative to its dark blue outline, giving the effect of a thick border on one side and a thin/non-existent border on the other.
Our rating: A solid, if not spectacular, diagrammatic bus route map, let down by some poor typographical choices and some lazy revisions. Two-and-a-half stars.
Source: Official LPP website – link no longer active
Amazing series of photos by Henry Hargreaves where he recreates transit maps out of everyday materials. Shown here are Moscow made from coloured yarn, and New York, beautifully recreated with ribbon. He’s also done Paris, London and Washington, DC.
Source: CMYBacon – link no longer active
Still in Tokyo, but can I just say how much I adore this wayfinding system? Bright and attractive floor-to-ceiling illuminated signs with simple, easy-to-understand iconography and impossible to miss directional arrows (note how they’re located above head height, so they’re always visible, even in a crowd). And there’s a nice big locality map, too! Stuff like this makes a transit system fun and pleasant to use, but its worth often seems to be underestimated.
Source: librarymook/Flickr
No matter how simple the system, there still always seems to be infinite potential for confusion – even if it’s just choosing which side of the platform to stand on.
Source: -Canonist-/Flickr
Simply lovely photo. Although… is that a Mickey Mouse pattern on her kimono?
Source: davegolden/Flickr
Designed to showcase two new typeface families from the FontFont foundry, this “Metro map” looks quite spectacular at first glance, with some lovely colour combinations and design details. It’s only on closer inspection that you realise that it’s actually a superb piece of nonsense – nothing really makes any sense at all.
Most type – apart from the few major “stations” – is way too small to be useful, and the circled line designations are scattered randomly around, instead of being located at the end of routes. There’s also a faint grid at a very slight angle, which lines up with neither the orthogonal grid of the routes or the north pointer at the bottom left. And what do the thin white lines across the route lines mean? Even the station names themselves are a bit of a hodge-podge: many are named after Paris Métro stations, but there’s also a few famous people thrown in, and even a few basic French words here and there.
And yes, I realise how silly it is to nitpick an imaginary transit map created to showcase some shiny new typefaces, but – hey, that’s what I do.
Source: FontFont/Flickr – link no longer active
