The lovely 1970 Dutch train map featured in my previous post was brought to my attention by the author of this map – a pitch-perfect recreation of the current IntercIty network in the old map’s style. Apart from a bit of welcome clean-up to the islands at bottom left (a big improvement in the clarity of the cartography here), everything else is faithfully rendered – including the odd little notch taken out of the south bank of the Afsluitdijk, which I can’t really see a reason for on either map.
Veen notes that Nederlandse Spoorwegen still uses the “A” through “H” designations from the 1970s for Intercity lines today, so there’s quite a bit of commonality between the two maps. There’s some extra granularity in the modern network, as most of the letters are broken up into “a” and “b” sub-designations as well. Veen shows this by giving related lines similar colours, which works quite effectively. There’s also a few “non-letter” IC routes that have been worked in quite nicely as well. I don’t think Veen’s thicker station ticks are quite as elegant as the hairline ones used in the 1970s map, but they do the job.
Overall, a thoughtful adaptation of an old map’s style to show the current system. A fun design exercise, and very deftly executed.
A rather lovely minimalist diagram of Intercity trains in The Netherlands as introduced by the Spoorslag 70 plan, an effort at modernising and standardising passenger train travel in that country.
The coastline at the bottom left gets a little complex compared to the simplicity of the rest of the map, and all the type is angled (but at least all on the same axis!), but otherwise this is really quite lovely. The single thin black tick across the route lines to indicate a station is simple and effective, even on stations like Utrecht with multiple lines passing through.
Our rating: Fantastic early-1970s European design. Clean and elegant. Four-and-a-half stars!
Source:Wikimedia Commons – I’ve cleaned up and brightened the picture for publication a bit
I stumbled upon this diagram of MTA services available from the MTA. While the general positioning of the lines looks like it’s very clean and has very good bones, the small design decisions (like the shape of transfer points to subway and commuter rail, the rail tickmarks, etc.) make this map feel very cheap and tacky.
Transit Maps says:
I’m not really feeling this map at all, Henry… not the least because it appears to be a poor-quality image (A scan of a printed page? Surely not!) that has had both sides cropped off: note that labels and the legend are truncated on both sides… oops! That’s pretty poor work for a major transit agency like the MTA.
It appears to have been produced in the short window between the reopening of the “W” (November 7, 2016) and the opening of the Second Avenue Subway with its rerouting of the “Q” (January 1, 2017) – so it already needs an update to be accurate, as the SAS is missing entirely.
The map itself is an uncomfortable blend of the regular subway map – geography, colours, typefaces, tickmarked railroads for Metro-North and the LIRR, etc. – and a stylised transit diagram. This means we get accurate outlines for parkland (and, bizarrely, all the roads within Central Park and on Randalls and Wards Islands!), but also simplified route lines which omit most intermediate stations in favour of highlighting connection points. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as most users will effectively orient themselves using these “landmark” interchanges, and it does handle tourist trips between the airport and Manhattan quite well.
As Henry says, the attention to detail on this map is somewhat lacking – best illustrated by the oddly tiny interchange marker at 63rd Drive/Rego Park. Also, the note at the bottom of the map about late night/weekend service seems to use a different point size for the first line, suggesting that it was edited after the initial version to add the “W” to the list of affected lines and the type had to get smaller to squeeze everything in.
Our rating: Something of a neglected afterthought without much love or care applied to it. Two stars.
Submitted by Sergey, who also drew my attention to the recently-revised schematic for the entire Moscow Metro as well. However, this new strip map for the Central Circle Line really caught my eye, as it’s a fascinating approach to solving a very difficult problem: how do you concisely show a loop line (with a lot of stations!) in the narrow confines of a railcar strip map?
ArtLebedev’s solution is to view the circular line from an oblique perspective: with the circle compressed vertically into a shallow oval. As seen in the second image above, the labels and other design elements are all also viewed from the same viewpoint, creating an effective illusion of depth and space, augmented by the visually clever little “flip” of the circle as it moves from the front edge to the back. Elegantly, Moscow’s centre is simply indicated by a small red star in the middle of the ellipse.
The glowing red drop shadow that defines the edges of the white route line seems a little ostentatious – and might perhaps make the map age badly when this type of effect isn’t so much in vogue in a few years – but it does work well to differentiate this line from other Metro lines on the full system map.
Our rating: A stylish, visually attractive way of depicting a circular route in a limited space. Creates an almost three-dimensional space instead of a flat planar map. Great work as always from this studio – four stars!
Source:ArtLebedev website – as always, a great walkthrough of the design process, and a look at newly redesigned strip maps for other Metro lines as well.
I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a while: what is your opinion of the original styling of Helsinki’s Metro map?
(Photo taken from this site, unfortunately I couldn’t find a better one). After several revisions, the current version looks like this, which is more international in style.
Personally, I think the original is surprisingly readable while being pleasantly unique in style, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Transit Maps says:
I definitely agree – the original map (dating from 1982, the year the Helsinki Metro opened) is quite charming. Yes, the map is simple – a single line with just nine stations – but it turns that simplicity into a virtue and creates something quite elegant and stylish. The unusual station markers – just a gap between line segments – are very effective and help form a grid for the informational text both above and below the line. The bus numbers beneath the line are beautifully typeset, with numbers right-aligned, but with the letter suffixes offset to the right for easy reference: I love this sort of attention to detail!
What I like most of all is that the designers have totally resisted trying to make their little system look more impressive by adding extraneous detail: something that other single line transit systems have been guilty of over the years. If there’s one tiny flaw, it’s that the last station name to the right is cut off by the frame around the map. The stylish minimalist wayfinding signage above the map adds to the appeal as well.
The modern map is very competent, but it just doesn’t have the same sort of confident verve that the original map has. Rather, it uses a lot of standard transit map design elements – circles for stations, slightly rounded curves, a friendly sans serif typeface – to create something that feels comfortable and blandly familiar. The station labels set at a 90-degree angle are also a little harder to read than the original 45-degree angled type.
An interesting progression for sure! Four stars for the old map, 3 for the new.
I’ve long admired this beautiful 1954 flow diagram of subway service into Manhattan during the morning peak hour, so I set myself the personal challenge of recreating it using modern design tools (Adobe Illustrator) while still staying true to the original principles of the map.
While it was certainly possible to just trace the source material in Illustrator with the pen tool and end up with a decent facsimile of the original, there’s really nothing to be learned from doing so. I wanted to understand how the original diagram maker might have worked, and to see just how accurately the diagram represents the service numbers as shown on all the labels.
Using the map’s “Scale of Cars”, I was able to work out a formula that would give me the numerically accurate stroke width to use based on the numbers presented, which I then applied to all the different lines as shown on the map. The numbers held true throughout most of the map, with only the very thinnest lines (the lowest number of trains per hour) being slightly thickened on the map for clarity and ease of drawing. “Cheating” to get things to line up or add up only happens in a couple of locations across the map – mainly at complex junctions – which is definitely a testament to the original designer’s skills.
Once I had drawn all my paths to the right width and placement for each subway division (BMT, IRT and IND), I expanded them out into polygons that I could then merge into compound paths for the final artwork. These shapes were then copied to a layer above the fills to be used as a basis for the black strokes used to define each route line.
Typography was actually pretty easy for this map, with everything being easily identifiable: Futura is the main labelling font, with the slab serif Rockwell being used for some locality information. Water features are labelled in Century Schoolbook Italic, and feature the only concession to modern design tools on the map – using a neat white stroke behind each letter to separate it from the stippled background rather than the clumsy cut-out rectangles of the original. Finding a good match for the Art Deco borough names was perhaps the hardest task – Neutraface isn’t exactly perfect, but it definitely evokes the right feeling.
A quick note on mid-century typography here: tracking is generally much looser than what we’re used to with modern digital typesetting (a setting of +60 to +80 in Illustrator’s Character palette was often required to get type to match the original, along with a fair bit of manual kerning), and word spacing is positively enormous, being just shy of two standard-width spaces in most cases, or close to an em-space. A couple of things to bear in mind if you’re ever after that “1950s look” to your typography!
After the hard work of drawing the route lines, it was then just a matter of tediously adding all the labels, arrows and underlying geography to the map. The stipple effect used for the water matches the original very nicely, and is actually a cartographic Illustrator pattern swatch that normally represents sandy areas on a map. The water “contours” are offset copies of the coastline path: on the original map, these would have been drawn by hand.
Overall, recreating this map was very enjoyable and instructive, and the end result is certainly quite beautiful. Let me know what you think of my efforts in the comments section below!
Here’s a great old system map of Sydney’s suburban rail system from around the middle of the 1970s. It has to be from before 1978, as that’s the year that the Eastern Suburbs line opened, and it’s not shown here. I distinctly remember seeing a few of these in old “Red Rattler” carriages in the mid-to-late 1980s, so they lived on well past their “use by” date. As seen here, the maps lived above the windows in the main compartment of the carriage, and were quite large, around 5 feet by 1 foot or so. The noisy metal window blinds that gave the “Rattlers” their name are clearly visible below the map.
As expected in a strip map like this, any relation to real-world geography is tenuous at best. South is to the left and north is at bottom right, but all the other lines have had to be splayed out to fit the narrow shape. In reality, the end of the orange East Hills line (top left) is quite close to Macquarie Fields on the (dark) green Liverpool-Campbelltown line (top right). However, the topology of the network is indicated fairly clearly and the hub-and-spoke nature of the network of the time allows this treatment to work.
Also of note is the interesting treatment of the City Circle, with alternating dashes of each line’s colours to indicate how each one makes a circuit of the loop before heading back out to the suburbs via Central. It’s not actually very accurate, as there shouldn’t be any North Shore line pink from Wynyard to Central via Museum (this line always crosses the Harbour Bridge after Wynyard), but I doubt it was ever meant to give a realistic idea of service patterns.
It’s also kind of fun to see all the little branch lines off the Western line to the abbatoirs, Sandown and Rope’s Creek. Of these, only the Carlingford line remains today. Finally, it’s always great to see the glorious 1970s NSW Transport “arrow of indecision” as well! Every good rail system needs a logo with arrows pointing in opposite directions, right?
Our rating: An early prototype of future Sydney rail maps, with most of the route colours already in the form they’d be in for the next 20 years or so. Type’s quite small, but the layout is clear and easy to follow for such an extensive network. Three stars.
A few months back you answered a question of mine with some tips for preparing artwork for inkjet printing. Everything printed great, so thanks again for your help! Thought you might enjoy seeing the finished map.
Transit Maps says:
I always say that if you’re going to do an “in the style of” map, you should aim to replicate the source as closely as possible. That’s how you learn what made the original map tick, and that can help inform your future design decisions. And Cullen’s map has certainly nailed the look and feel of the original 1972 Vignelli New York Subway Diagram perfectly – from the colours and the typography, right down to the 10×10 grid and the reworking of the LA Metro’s logo to pay homage to the 1970s NYCTA logo (a very nice touch!).
The map itself shows a potential near-future Los Angeles after the completion of the Regional Connector: note that the Blue and Gold lines have been realigned (with the Gold merging with the current Expo line), and all the routes have been assigned letter designations. These letters and routes come from this 2015 Metro report (PDF), and certainly help complete the “New Yorkification” of this diagram. What’s a real city without an “A” train, right?
I’ve got a whole slew of requests for a review of this recently released map, so hold onto your hats! First off, this map is the final result of a three year process – Transit Maps reviewed an initial concept back in April 2014 – so it’s definitely taken a while to reach this final form. The gradual adoption of a new corporate identity for Public Transport Victoria (PTV), complete with a custom typeface called “Network Sans”, may have had something to do with this long gestation.
Overall, I really quite like this map. It’s technically well-drawn and pleasingly compact and is definitely an improvement over the old two-colour zonal Metro map. The new map uses colour coding for routes, but it’s more akin to the New York Subway map’s “grouping by shared trunk line” technique than the London Underground’s “every route gets its own colour” approach. The hub-and-spoke nature of the network means that this isn’t really a problem, though, as the lines don’t really interact with each other away from the CBD. A definite advantage of this approach is that there’s less lines to draw through the City Loop!
(As a side note, the 2014 draft map did a much better job of showing that the Alamein Line operates as a shuttle to Camberwell at non-peak times; that information is relegated to the legend here. Show, don’t tell!)
A question I’ve been asked: should this map show regional trains (which cover much of the entire state of Victoria) on the same map as Melbourne’s metropolitan rail service? I will say that it’s unusual to depict these two different types of services on the same map, but I think it works here for a few reasons.
One: regional trains act as commuter rail from some satellite suburbs just outside Melbourne, like Bacchus Marsh or Heathcote Junction. These areas lack Metro service, but are still within fare zones 1 and 2, shown as the white area on the map.
Two: the networks mostly share the same myki fare system (and the map clearly indicates where an old-school paper ticket is required at the truly distant ends of the line), so the two systems act as an integrated whole. And if you’re going to go to the trouble of having a fare system that covers pretty much the whole state, then I think you can show all the rail services that use it on the same map.
Three: the grey shading used to denote fare zones 3 through 13 (i.e., “Not Melbourne”) also acts as a clear boundary between the more geographical central part of the map and the schematic representation of the rest of Victoria. Yes, it’d be nice if Albury was closer to the top of the map than Shepparton, but it’s not hugely important for the purposes of this map.
Perhaps the only thing “wrong” with this approach is that the equal visual treatment of Metro and V/Line implies an equal level of service in terms of frequency, which almost certainly isn’t true, especially the further from Melbourne you get. A lighter colour or maybe grey for V/Line, or a thinner route line, could alleviate this problem somewhat, but PTV have made it pretty clear that purple is the official colour they’re using for regional services, as seen on this map reviewed in November 2015.
One other minor technical thing is that the grey used for the grid lines is almost as dark as the text used for station labels, and can interfere with readability in some instances. At Batman station, it almost looks like a strikethrough!
Our rating: A definite improvement! An unusual approach that combines metro services with regional trains, but I think it does a pretty decent job overall. Three-and-a-half stars!
Thanks to just about everyone for sending me pictures of this commemorative Vignelli-style New York subway diagram that was released when the Second Avenue Subway (finally) opened. My spies on the ground in New York are sending me a physical copy as we speak, which is awesome.
This revised design was carried out by Massimo Vignelli’s proteges, Beatriz Cifuentes and Yoshiki Waterhouse, who have been entrusted with the stewardship of the design moving forward. This marks the start of the third distinct phase of the diagram’s evolution: the 1970s original, the 2008-2012 revival under Vignelli, and now this latest iteration. It looks like it’s in good hands, at least!
