A hand-coloured and lettered (in what looks like colour pencil!) map showing the various streetcar, interurban trains and bus routes in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia in 1953 – just five years before the interurban trains ceased operations. The north pointer on this map is one of the loveliest I have seen.
See also: this charming illustrated transit map of Vancouver from 1930.
Source: City of Vancouver Archives/Flickr
Submitted by Sam, who says:
Hey! For my Graphic Design Thesis, I created a Graphics Standard Update proposal for SEPTA. This includes a System Map (attached), a line map, and various other identity pieces.
The most challenging part of the project was creating a Transit map that organized the current information in a way that felt unique to Philadelphia, and increased readability.
Transit Maps says:
A bold and radical departure from the status quo from Sam here, and one that’s largely successful in my eyes. Whereas most attempts at a redesigned Philadelphia transit map are content to work withing the confines of a standard octolinear transit map, Sam has decided to reduce everything to a severe rectangular grid, eschewing geography almost entirely. The Schuylkill and Delaware rivers do give some context, but this is a heavily stylised diagram, not really a map in any traditional sense.
I really like Sam’s solution for showing free versus paid transfers – a solid black line for the former and a lighter diagonally striped “zone” or “corridor” for the latter, However, I think the legend explaining the transfers has an error: it erroneously says that free interchanges require an additional fare.
Less successful is Sam’s use of a white ring to denote accessible stations, while a white dot is used to show an inaccessible station. A dot looks more “complete” and is visually stronger than a ring, so I personally would have swapped the meaning of these two symbols.
Sadly, Philly’s venerable trolleys are once again given short shrift, with even less stops named than on the official map. It gives the diagram room to breathe, especially on the Media Line, but at the cost of required information? It almost begs the question of whether or not the trolleys should be shown with a thinner line than all the other services, as they are obviously the lowest component in the information hierarchy.
Speaking of hierarchy, I think a diagram like this should have a stricter layering order for all the services: rapid transit always on top, then regional rail, then trolleys, for example. At the moment, different levels of service sometimes pass on top or below other services in various places without a discernible reason why.
Our rating: An “thinking outside the box” solution that’s probably way too radical for any U.S. transit agency to even consider using. I think it’s well thought through and attractive, if a little imperfect. Huge credit for trying something so radical. Three-and-a-half stars.
You can also download a PDF about the whole identity for SEPTA that Sam has developed. The map is impressive by itself, but the way it integrates with a wider branding system is even more so.
Denver’s rapidly-expanding rail network took another step forward today with the opening of the new commuter rail service out to Denver International Airport – the “train to the plane”, as they (a little unoriginally) call it.
However, for those – like me! – hoping for a new map to celebrate the new service, you’re in for a disappointment, as the latest offering is just a minimally-modified version of the previous map (June 2016, 1.5 stars). Wisely, the future “N” line, which isn’t opening until 2018, has been removed from the map, but almost everything else remains the same as before, apart from two very odd changes.
Firstly, the decision have the new line named by a corporate sponsorship deal with the University of Colorado. It’s now officially the University of Colorado A Line, which is a mouthful, as well as perhaps a little bit confusing. Which line do you take to the airport? The University of Colorado line, obviously! The Denver campus is probably just close enough to Union Station to justify the name inbound from the airport, but as it’s not indicated on the map that point is probably moot.
I’m well aware that transit agencies have to look for creative alternative sources of income, but I’m really not a big advocate for this sort of naming rights deal, especially for an entire route that has very little to do geographically with the named sponsor.
The other weird update is the switching of the concentric fare zones from numbers (Zones 1, 2 and 3) to letters (Zones A, B and C). Seeing as the route lines already use lettered designations, it would seem preferable to leave the zones as numbers to easily distinguish between the two different types of information.
Our rating: More of the same. Still 1.5 stars.
Source: RTD rail network map page
Not the world’s most original ad concept, but at least it’s executed nicely, with those distinctively Parisian route line colours used to good effect against the black background.
Source: Clemence de Moel/Flickr – link no longer active
A nice and friendly-looking schematic bus map from the city of Sundsvall in Västernorrland County, Sweden. The filename of the map’s PDF actually refers to it as a tunnelbanekarta – basically, (in the style of) a subway map – which has led to the map being posted to reddit in the belief that it’s an actual subway/metro map of the city. I would have thought the giant “BUSS NAVET” (bus hub) circle in the centre of the map might have given a clue to the true nature of the map, but whatever…
Despite the schematic look of the map, it actually corresponds quite well with the geographical lay of the land in real life, and the large destination labels would definitely let locals know where each bus was going. One could argue that the inclusion of the distinctive coastline around the city could add some more location cues, but I’m really enjoying the clean simplicity of this map. The fat, brightly coloured route lines are nicely complemented by some chunky, friendly typography (Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir Next), and the whole effect is very pleasant and welcoming. The northeast part of the map is perhaps a little too complex and crowded compared to the rest of the map – the section where lines 1 and 5 share stops seems particularly cramped – but it’s not too bad overall.
I am a little perplexed by the apple icon at the Mittuniversitetet stop: I don’t know what it represents (it’s not the official university logo), and it’s also clearly the Apple, Inc. logo with the left side copied and flipped to the right to remove the distinctive “bite”. The artwork viewed in Illustrator makes this even more obvious, as the icon is made up of two separate halves that haven’t been merged together.
Our rating: Chunky, colourful and friendly. I like it! Three-and-a-half stars.
Source: DinTur.se website – link no longer active
Question: Hi Cameron, I’m wrapping up a transit map project that I’ll likely print professionally. I was all set to send the printer a PDF until I happened to catch one of your tweets that mentioned using a high-resolution JPEG instead. I’m wondering if you could share your recommended practices for exporting from Illustrator to print-ready JPEG in terms of resolution, color profiles, and the like. The last thing any of us wants is to shell out $$$ for printing only to wind up with crappy results! Thanks!
Answer: Print requirements vary from print shop to print shop, so my best advice is to talk to the people that you’ve chosen and discuss these things with them. Communication is key to a good print job!
A PDF is far more likely to be acceptable to someone who is printing four-colour process through a proper RIP engine than to someone printing on a high-end inkjet printer. Inkjets often lack a RIP, so they can’t process Postscript or PDF files properly, ending up with output like this. (Image courtesy of Oran Viriyincy/Twitter)
What’s happening here is that the printer can’t use the Postscript/PDF, so it fakes it (badly) by printing the lower-resolution raster preview instead. Ugly, and completely unacceptable.
I used to send vector PDFs to my inkjet print guy until he told me that he just opened them in Photoshop and exported them as flattened PSDs to print. So now I do it myself, just as reassurance that everything is going to look exactly the way I want it to. For inkjet printing, 300dpi RGB files in the sRGB colour space work perfectly for me (any RGB colour space has a larger gamut – or range of colours – than CMYK). Your printer should have a colour profile that matches the paper they’re printing on to ensure colour fidelity.
Exporting is easy enough. Make your final vector PDF or EPS from Illustrator, and simply open that file in Photoshop. Choose the required print dimensions, resolution (300dpi) and colour space (RGB) in the dialog box… let it process… check everything looks as it should, flatten the image and save! You could also export as a TIF or PSD via Illustrator’s File > Export menu item, but I’ve personally found that this can misinterpret objects on occasion, making it too unreliable for me to trust.
I’d recommend PSD or TIF over JPG as your final file format as they are lossless formats: even a high-quality JPG discards some information to get those small file sizes.
And definitely get a proof print before committing to a print run – if the quality is unacceptable, work out why or find a new print shop if they can’t help.
Submitted by Frederico, who says:
Here’s the new diagram for Transtejo, the company that manages Lisbon’s main waterways lines. It is part of Transportes de Lisboa, the main company, along with Metro and Carris, the one that provides buses and trams.
I can’t decide if I like it or not… It definitely inherited the simplism and amazing typeface from Lisbon’s Metro map, which I approve, but I feel like it could be better executed. There’s discrepancies between the stop’s names – Seixal’s font is larger than the rest for no apparent reason and Belém and Montijo names and connections are aligned differently from the rest. I’m not sure about using colors to designate the lines either, mainly because it’s the same ones of the metro lines.
Overall, I still think it’s a solid map. Does the job and maintains the design identity of its company. What do you think?
Transit Maps says:
It’s certainly a solid effort, but definitely not in the same league as its parent map (November 2011, 4 stars). For me, it’s lacking that map’s attention to detail: the enlarged typeface for Seixal that Frederico mentions, the the labels and icons for Terriero de Paço and Montijo that carelessly overlap the shoreline, and the can’t-unsee-it way that the Ponte 25 de Abril doesn’t quite reach the southern shoreline all add up to a slightly sloppy effort.
Personally, I also don’t find the shape of the Tagus River estuary to be very visually pleasing (A stomach? A toilet bowl?), although I do appreciate the way that the Lisbon side of the river would dovetail perfectly into the Metro map.
However, I don’t mind that this map uses similar colours to he Metro map, as that helps to provide continuity between the two maps. It’d be an issue if both services appeared on the same map (and maybe they should: an integrated approach should always be considered), but as it is, I think it’s fine.
Our rating: Uses the elements of the lovely Lisbon Metro map to decidedly average effect. Two-and-a-half stars.
Source: Official Transtejo website
Submitted by Simon, who says:
I recently found this horrible official map of the regional buses in the North-German town of Wismar. I already planned to make them a proper map until I found out that this bus company doesn’t operate anymore since the end of 2015, so it probably doesn’t matter.
Transit Maps says:
Not operating anymore, huh? I wonder if having a map that made it virtually impossible to work out where any buses went had anything to do with that…
I’m being facetious, of course, but there’s no doubting that this is an execrable piece of cartography and information design. The worst part is the absence of almost all the route numbers from the enormous circle indicating Wismar itself… surely most, if not all, of the routes pass through the hub of the network? And poor old Kirchdorf: worthy of a dot, but not a bus.
Our rating: Do you even have to ask? Straight to the Hall of Shame!
I’ve covered a previous version of this map before (November 2013, 4 stars), but I think this recent update is worth showing, because it’s always fun to see how a concept can evolve over time.
Like the most recent version of the official map and Bernie Ng (November 2013, 3.5 stars). Andrew has come to the conclusion that placing the alphanumeric station identifiers inside each station marker is the best way to go, and it helps the map tremendously. Finding the extra space to place the identifiers adjacent to a station was always problematic, and will become even more so with triple interchanges like Dhoby Ghaut and Outram Park coming online as the system rapidly expands.
The new extension to the planned Thompson line past Gardens by the Sea allows Andrew to introduce a lovely curve that echoes that of the Downtown Line above it at the bottom of the map at Shenton Way – a big improvement over his previous iteration. The repeating loop motif that runs through this map is deftly executed and provides the “visual hook” that I always like to see in a good transit map: the design element that ties the whole thing together as a pleasing whole.
A few minor points: the two sets of LRT loops to the northeast are perhaps just a little too close to each other, with labels that almost clash at Compassvale and Coral Edge, for example. Similarly, stacking the label at Lorong Chuan in two lines would perhaps keep better visual distance away from the stations on the North East Line. The Downtown Line crossover could be a little neater: the dashes don’t quite align with each other, creating a bit of an ugly clash (Andrew’s previous map was actually better here). Some of the outer stations seem comparatively cramped in their spacing compared to the relatively spacious central area.
While the map appears quite schematic, it actually aligns quite well with geographic reality (at least in the central part), as shown by this working diagram.
Our rating: An intelligent evolution of ideas. Still four stars, but a better four stars, if you know what I mean.
My dad just sent me this Sydney Ferries map as featured in the latest “Lonely Planet” Guide to that city. It’s obviously licensed from the official version (February 2015, 2.5 stars) with some minor edits like the removal of the background grid lines.
However, the map’s whole background has been accidentally shifted upwards, leaving all the routes seriously misplaced relative to the harbour. The Parramatta River line now appears to use Parramatta Road to reach its destination, while Taronga Zoo has relocated to Fort Denison in the middle of the harbour.
Oops.
It’s right up there with this 1977 map of BART with the entire Bay Area map rotated 180 degrees compared to the route lines.
