This scheme is a part of my diploma work at the Academy. I set the task to simplify the existing scheme and to find a brand new build schemes. A lot of searches in sketches, disputes. The river and the Islands in St. Petersburg — important guidelines. I managed to save them in the new scheme. Ambiguous result: on the one hand — it’s very simple, horizontal lines and vertical transplantation (elevators), maximum contrast; on the other, I neglected the habits of people. What do you think about this?
Transit Maps says:
There’s a lot to be said for the elegant simplicity behind this map: following a horizontal line means you’re travelling along a Metro line, while a vertical line indicates an interchange between lines at a station. The execution is quite lovely as well, with a shaded area representing the city centre and the useful presence of the city’s distinctive rivers. There’s lots of useful transfer information, as well.
However, it’s perhaps a bit too much of a radical departure from a normal transit map – even a diagrammatical one – to ever be a replacement for an official system map. I do see an application for it as an in-train strip map, though: its long, narrow shape would make it almost perfect in this regard!
Say what you like about Lyft (”awesome ride-sharing service” or “dangerously unregulated upstart taxi wannabe” seems to describe the polar opposites of opinion), but this is a pretty sweet ad campaign.
From the delightfully double-edged campaign name, “Friends with Transit” – which can either echo “friends with benefits”, or simply be a statement that Lyft complements public transportation – to the trademark hot pink lines filling in the gaps left behind by rail transit in each city, this is an on-point campaign. It deliberately ignores other “last-mile” transit options – walking, biking, taking the bus, car share or taxi – and memorably and visually supplants them with Lyft’s own service.
The campaign website (no longer active) supports the visuals with glowing reference quotes from transportation agencies as well as statistics that support the idea that transit and Lyft are meant for each other. For example, apparently South Station in Boston is Lyft’s second-most popular destination.
Clever, well-targeted and memorable – just about everything you want from a campaign.
Source: Lyft’s “Friends with Transit” website – link no longer active
Passport design has come a long way in the last few years, often being transformed from relatively dour official documents into elaborate and detailed expressions of national pride.
The new UK passport is no exception, with the theme of “Creative United Kingdom” tying all the page designs together, celebrating over 500 years of artists, landmarks and architecture, the performing arts and iconic innovations – including this spread for the London Underground, prominently featuring the Tube Map.
I’m not quite sure what version of the official Tube Map this is based on,if any: it looks mostly like the current map, but the “U” curve on the District Line to Kensington (Olympia) is way too wide, and the interchange station shown where the two branches of the Northern Line merge just north of Kennington doesn’t exist on the real map at all. There’s other oddities like this throughout the map which make me think it’s a redrawing made just for this artwork which maybe incorporates aspects of some different versions of the map. An artistic representation rather than an actual map, if you will. Interesting!
Lovely contents page illustration/map from Florent Chavouet’s book, Tokyo on Foot. The map is dominated by the circular Yamanote Line, with thick “train track” route lines and bright red stations. More than anything else on the page, this circle seems to define “Tokyo”. Quite lovely.
First published in the United Kingdom as Metro Maps of the World in 2003, this book has long been an indispensable reference book for graphic designers, train aficionados, cartographers, and geeks alike. However, its last major revision was in 2007 – and much has changed in the world of transit map design since then. More transit systems, new maps, revised maps, digital and web-based maps, the rise of the amateur map designer and more. Like its predecessors, this book remains very firmly aimed at the illustration and discussion of printed transit maps – digital mapping is only mentioned in passing – but is a more than worthwhile update.
If you’ve never owned a previous edition, then you’re in for a visual tour de force of maps, maps and more maps. If you do own an older copy of the book (as I do: see the picture above showing the cover of the new edition and the frontispiece of the 2007 version), then this new edition is still highly recommended. Almost every map depicted in the book is new: maps that have been updated since 2007, maps of new systems that didn’t exist back then, even new examples of historical maps for major networks.
The book has also been expanded, with more maps qualifying for “Zone 1″ treatment: an in-depth, multi-page discussion of the history of transit mapping in that particular city. Barcelona, Beijing, Boston, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo and Washington, DC join Berlin, Chicago, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, Paris and Tokyo as the heavyweights of the transit map world, and the discussion is both lively and informative. There’s quite a few maps in this section that I’ve never seen before, and that’s becoming an increasingly rare thing!
Zones 2 and 3 show hundreds of further maps in decreasing detail – some cities only get a quarter-page each, which can strain the eyeballs a bit a times – while Zone 4 provides a comprehensive listing of just about every urban railway network extant in the world at present: almost 1,000 entries all told. A few further maps are dotted throughout this section. This last section does reveal a bit of a lie to the cover’s claim of being “the world’s first collection of every urban train map on Earth” – every system is mentioned, but we certainly don’t see every map. Still, as that would require an impossibly large book, I’ll let it slide.
One addition to this version of the book that I’m overjoyed to see is the inclusion of many unofficial maps produced by talented amateur designers. The modern internet allows such works to be seen, admired and criticized by a global audience through design websites and blogs such as Transit Maps. Indeed, many of the designers featured in the book will already be familiar to readers – Maxwell Roberts, Jug Cerovic, Steve Boland, and even yours truly. Some of these maps are arguably superior to the real thing, while some have actually become official – the MBTA map based off Michael Kvrivishvili’s winning contest entry gets a full page with the dry note, “The geographical distortion of the Green lines is notable.”
Is the book awesome? Yes, it is. Is it perfect? Not quite.
Apart from the small size of some maps mentioned above, the book could have perhaps benefited from another round of editing. There’s a few typographical and grammatical errors sprinkled throughout (Jug Cerovic’s name gets spelled three different ways, for example), and some image captions aren’t numbered correctly. The reproduction quality of some of the historical maps is a little uneven – a page showing four distinctly different versions of H.C. Beck’s famous Underground Map stands out the most in this regard – but this is perhaps understandable given the variety of sources that the maps come from.
Overall, the print quality is very high and consistent throughout. The book is printed on quality paper, and – at 176pp plus cover – has a good heft to it. Hopefully, the perfect binding used will stand up to constant use, as I feel I’ll be coming back to this book again and again.
Our rating: Basically, if you read this blog – even casually – then this book is essential. Some very minor errors do not detract at all from the awesomeness of having all these fantastic maps from all over the world in one superb reference volume. Complements the previous editions rather than repeating them. Four-and-a-half stars.
Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden is available now and can be purchased from Amazon here (affiliate link – buy the book from this link and support the “Transit Maps” blog!).
Sent my way by Nick Stylianou, here’s a map out of Melbourne, Victoria designed to support a major revamp of weekend night time transit in and around that city. For me, this piece continues a worrying recent trend of night service maps that have poor contrast and legibility, simply for the sake of pushing a dark “night” colour theme. This one even has freakin’ stars in the background, which is starting to verge on the ridiculous.
You know what? The title of the map says “Night Network” with a big crescent moon next to it: I think we can work things out from here.
Another thing that is lacking is enough detail to actually work out travel plans based on this map alone. An equivalent daytime map would have route numbers for trams and buses and properly-defined symbols for stations and stops, rather than the “general area” labels dotted around this map (including one for the Bellarine Peninsula, which isn’t even reachable via this network). At the very least, Flinders Street station – the night system’s main hub – should be properly and definitively located on the map instead of being vaguely indicated by a weird tangle of routes that may or may not indicate its position.
The absolute worst thing about this map, however, is its lack of accessibility for colour-blind users. A quick simulation in Photoshop (the second image above) reveals that the orange bus and green tram colours end up an almost identical shade of muddy yellow. With no route numbers or other identification appearing on the map or in a legend, they are nigh-on impossible to tell apart. The train and long-distance coach route lines fare a little better, but their dull blue shades still offer very low contrast with the dark background.
Our rating: Let’s be honest – people who are catching night services home from the city at 2am on the weekend are going to need more help navigating an unfamiliar system than regular daytime commuters. This map by itself doesn’t really offer that help – although I will note that it is supplemented by more detailed bus route and CBD stop location maps which seem to be a little more helpful. This is tolerable as a general introductory map to the new network, but it’s really not suited in any way to actual navigation. One star.
Redesigning the New York Subway Map sometimes feels like a bit of a “no win” for designers, mainly because it’ll always, always be compared to the seminal Massimo Vignelli diagram. That said, I’m really liking this attempt by Tommi Moilanen, which embraces not only the Vignelli map and the design language of the subway system itself, but adds its own modern minimalist touches as well.
The first thing to note is that the map depicts weekday peak hour services using a very simple device: thick route lines equal express services, thin route lines equal local. Skip-stop stations are tinted back to a lighter shade. All this and more is explained in a wonderfully minimalist written word legend at the top right of the map. Keeping it simple really works here: the legend sets out the rules of the map very efficiently.
I also love the treatment of major interchange stations, as shown at Atlantic Avenue in the detail image above. The name of the station spans across the lines it serves, rather than sitting next to it, immediately indicating that this station is important. The typography and the black bar above the station name are deliberately reminiscent of the original Vignelli-designed subway signage, which was black type on a white background, the reverse of the current signage. The little curved joining line for transfers between lines is quite delightful, immediately and almost joyfully communicating that this part of the trip isn’t made by train.
The boroughs are only indicated by large typographical labels and thin white dividing lines between them, reminding me of Vignelli’s thought that he should have left the water off his map as it was too distracting. Tommi instead uses little icons for landmarks throughout the city and the ubiquitous Central Park as guides for readers of the map. Central Park is perhaps the weakest part of the map for me: I find its colour way too dark and rich, and at odds with the simplicity of the rest of the background. As it is, it dominates the map almost completely, despite its small size.
Tommi’s used a 30/60° grid, which immediately sets it apart from most other diagrammatic maps of New York, Vignelli’s included. He’s also included PATH within Manhattan, but doesn’t show any stations on the New Jersey side, despite there being plenty of space to do so. Perhaps even a small label indicating which PATH stations could be reached off the edge of the map would be useful.
Our rating: Pays excellent homage to New York’s transit design history, but manages to look fresh and new. Already one of my favourite alternative New York Subway maps. Head on over to Tommi’s page about the project to read more about its development. Four stars!
This is the Cape Town Metrorail map as posted in the Cape Town railway station. It’s a pretty straight forward map with the lines radiating out to the east of the CBD, though it has some complexity with lines of the same colour operating multiple courses to the same terminal: for example, the green and blue lines. Thoughts?
Transit Maps says:
Despite the “Metrorail” moniker, this system is really commuter rail, and not a rapid transit system. The Metrorail agency operates services like this throughout South Africa, so this map follows a similar design language to the other regions. I’ve previously covered the map for the Gauteng Metrorail system (September 2013, 1.5 stars).
Because of the similar design philosophy, this map has a lot of the same flaws as the Gauteng map: type angled in too many directions, discordant colours, etc. The use of a cyan-edged station symbol to indicate rail interchanges is particularly boneheaded when one of the Central Line is also indicated in cyan: almost every station on that line inadvertently looks like a major interchange, even when no other lines are present.
As Edward points out, the green Northern Line and cyan Central Line do operate along multiple branches, which can be a little hard to decipher on the map. From what I can work out, the Northern Line can operate to Bellville along either of the two green lines from Cape Town, then split to one of three final destinations. The lack of a joining curve at the T-junction between Eerste River and Lynedoch makes it hard to work out how that intersection operates… some trains go from Cape Town down to Strand, while others turn to go through Stellenbosch to Wellington. All I can hope is that regular commuters know these service patterns, because the map isn’t helping a lot.
The inclusion of starred places of interest is welcome, but the implementation at Cape Town station is very odd. Whereas most of the star icons are just placed near a station to indicate that the point of interest is nearby, the stars near Cape Town station – for the Castle of Good Hope and Greenpoint Stadium – have been placed in seemingly geographical locations. The stadium is in a pretty decent location, although it’s difficult to tell exactly how far away it is on a diagrammatic map like this. However, the castle is in a completely incorrect location, shown halfway between the station and the stadium. It actually nestles almost alongside the station along its southern edge, as this Google Maps location shows.
Our rating: Very similar to the Gauteng Metrorail map, sharing a lot of its faults. Overall, ever so slightly better executed but still not great. Two stars.
Watching WNYC’s “Live Subway Agony Index” as the downtown 6X goes into meltdown is kind of awesome. So many UGGGHHHs.
If you’ve never seen this before, it’s a service that pulls real-time MTA data for the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 6x and converts it into emoji that encapsulates the current feelings of passengers at that station. Simple but effective!
Another awesome year completed! Thanks to everyone for all your discussion, submissions, reblogs, faves and retweets – I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.
