Fast forward ten years from yesterday’s excellent diagrammatic map of bus services in Iceland, and we’re now left with this sad thing. There are far fewer routes, although I’m not sure if that’s because service has been reduced or the map is only showing the routes of one company.
The geographically-accurate shape of Iceland sits uneasily with the crudely straightened route lines: this map has none of the elegance of the earlier version. On a positive note, the glaciers are white now, which is better than blue!
Our rating: Disappointingly average, especially compared to the earlier map. 2.5 stars.
Great photo of a handsome rectilinear diagram of island-wide bus services in Iceland from back in 2005. The big blue blobs in the middle aren’t lakes, they’re glaciers. Reykjavik’s importance as the main transportation hub is well illustrated.
Based on feedback from the first draft of this new version of my Amtrak as subway map, I’ve gone and made a few edits, additions and corrections.
The major revision is a reworking of the main section of the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington to make things a little clearer. I’m still using overlapping “multiplied route colour” lines to indicate identical service patterns, but I’ve broken the routes down into smaller, thematically linked groups: the three “local” Empire Corridor routes (the Empire Service, Adirondack and Ethan Allen Express); the three “inland” routes (the Cardinal, Carolinian and Crescent); and the three Atlantic Coast/Florida routes (the Palmetto, Silver Meteor and Silver Star). These groupings are reflected in the ordering of the route designation disks at New York Penn Station, and the terminus dot for each group displays all three route colours.
With the help of readers, I’ve located and added another three stations: the North Carolina State Fair (which, like the New York State Fair station, only operates for the dates of the fair each year); Lexington, North Carolina (which is only open for one day each year – for the annual Barbecue Festival held in October); and Hillsborough, North Carolina, which is slated to open sometime in 2015. I also heard tell of a Charlotte Airport extension of Carolinian and Piedmont services, but can’t seem to find a solid construction date for it, so it remains off the map for the time being.
The Hoosier State is back on the map, which did require a change in colour for the City of New Orleans, as otherwise the red California Zephyr line would have been directly above the similarly-red City of New Orleans line, making it look as if one long route extended through Chicago. I appropriated the Palmetto’s orange line colour for this, and made the Palmetto a new silver-grey colour to tie in with the two other routes in its thematic group (the “Silver Service” trains).
On this version, I’ve also included the now long-suspended section of the Sunset Limited between New Orleans and Jacksonville, just so you can see how it fits neatly into the structure of the map. Restoration of this service by Amtrak is extremely unlikely, and I would not include this segment on any final version of this map.
As always, comments are most welcome! Almost there, I think!
I took Vignelli’s color contrast + existing map’s geographic accuracy = the subway map of my dreams.
… cheekily addressing the MTA’s Twitter account and asking them to “please fix.”
Shawn’s revision definitely allows the subway lines (without doubt, the most important element of the map) to stand out from the background, creating a far more defined visual hierarchy (subway information first and foremost, locality information on closer perusal), although perhaps the map looks a little drab overall. What do you think?
I’ve attached my draft map of an imaginary rail system for Connecticut — if you have time, I’d love to get your feedback!
We have little to nothing in the way of public transit that serves people who want to travel around and not just through Connecticut. We have some great bus systems (and our first BRT system!), but we’re served by rail lines that are used primarily for commuters to leave the state to work. I care a lot about my home state, and I can’t help but imagine how beneficial it’d be for us to have a system that serves so many currently unserved communities and helps them reach other parts of my state. This system would do just that.
I spent a lot of time struggling with how much information was right to present. I originally had Metro-North and Amtrak lines on here as well, but really struggled with labelling stations – because they currently serve so few stations on my map, I found it awkward for the lines to be there. More often than not, it just pushed the station labels farther from their lines — in too many cases, that led to confusing situations. And I struggled to decide how to portray them; should they be lines of equal length or thinner? How should interchange stations between them and the main lines work (this was particularly challenging)? And further, the whole driver behind the design of this system was to show how comprehensive the system is in moving citizens around Connecticut, not just through. So not portraying the actual interstate line helps emphasize this point.
I had originally started with circles as the main station signifier, but in trying to figure out how to incorporate the interstate lines, I found myself switching back and forth between circles, lines, and tick marks. I eventually ended up back where I started, and I feel confident with my choice.
I didn’t pay as much attention to color as I was hoping. Eight lines was a lot, and I found myself struggling to have line colors that were distinct from each other. In the end, I worked to make sure similar colors did not interact or were close.
Transit Maps says:
Nick sent me quite a few previous drafts of this map, and it was great to see the progression and improvement he made with each version. This is a really nice, well-considered piece that’s very clean and easy to look at. I particularly like the ligature “ct” logo: very stylish and clean.
I think the choice to only show intrastate routes, with additional pointers indicating Amtrak and Metro-North routes that continue outside the state is wise and prevents any possible confusion. Some might say that the newly-opened CTfastrack BRT between New Britain and Hartford should be shown, but hey – this is a fantasy map. Maybe in this world, the BRT never got built, or perhaps it’s been converted to light rail?
Nick says colours caused him some headaches, but I think he’s done a pretty decent job. The lemon yellow Bridgeport–Torrington line is a bit problematic as the white station dots disappear a little bit within it. I always like to make my “Yellow Lines” a little bit oranger to counteract this, something like M15 Y100 in a CMYK breakdown. The other slight problem is the concurrent green and orange lines into New London: it looks okay to normal viewers, but the two colours are actually very similar for some colour-blind users. Remember, you can proof for colour-blindness from within Illustrator and Photoshop.
Apart from that, I’d probably just move the “System Diagram” legend to the right to align with the right edge of the text above it. It just seems to be floating without any obvious relationship to other elements of the map at the moment.
All in all, really nice work here from Nick!
Source: Nick’s website – click through for some detail images and a full rationale behind the map.
After complaining on Twitter about how I found information in Amtrak’s timetables difficult to decipher, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and do a quick little redesign to prove my point. The brief to myself: it had to contain all the same information, use the same typeface (Frutiger), and fit in the same space as the original. Everything else was fair game, including colours, as the timetables are printed in four-colour brochures. However, I was more interested in making small, incremental changes for the better, rather than attempting a radical redesign. I posted the result quickly on Twitter last night and got quite a positive reaction, so here’s a more in-depth look at the redesign and the rationale behind it.
What you see above is the result of around an hour’s work in InDesign, and that includes transcribing all the information from the actual timetable by hand and quickly redrawing some of the icons. I also utilised Dimitry Goloub’s excellent Cittadino Symbols font for the disabled access and bus service icons to save a little bit of time. The original Amtrak Hoosier State/Cardinal timetable is the “before” (on the left), my version of it is to the right – use the scrubber to compare the two.
First, I worked to reduce the size of the header cells: the information there is necessary, but not so important that it needs to dominate so much of the top of the table. Reducing its height leaves more space for the rest of the rows in the table, giving everything a little more room to breathe.
Generally, I don’t like tables that are boxed in with thick black lines: they look inelegant and “Excel-like”, a rigid grid of information. An important decision for me was to remove the grid entirely when there’s no information to be shown – hence, all the white space in the Hoosier State columns until Indianapolis (where the service begins) is reached. No grid equals “nothing to look at here, move along”. While it doesn’t make a huge difference in this particular table, for something like the Northeast Regional, this could really help readers work out all the different start and end points of the many different trains that make up this complex service. Similarly, the bold blue rule across the top of the Hoosier State’s column will be useful to help distinguish between the actual train and other connecting services in the same column, something I often have trouble with in other, more complex, Amtrak timetables. The rest of the table uses alternating row fills to make it easier to read information across the table and white cell borders, which make the whole table less visually strong.
Some minor changes in the column headings: I say “Read from Top” and “Read From Bottom” instead of “Read Down” and “Read Up”, just for a slightly different approach. I’ve also flipped the “Miles” column to the right of the directional “Arrive/Depart” column, so that the abbreviations for “Arrive” and “Depart” are right next to the actual times indicated, instead of one column apart. Also, I reference “Services” available at each station , rather than the cryptic and less user-friendly “Symbol”. As a traveller, do I want services or symbols to be available to me at the station?
Onto the information contained in the body of the table itself! For a start, all the text is now at the same size: none of this crazy GIANT CAPS TEXT labelling for major stations along the route. It’s sufficient to call a small bit of attention to these stations by using a bolder version of the font and a different cell background colour, rather than interrupting the flow of the tables so completely each time one of these stations is come across.
24-hour time makes an appearance in my version: it both saves space by not having to append “A” or “P” to the time, and also makes it instantly clearer whether a train leaves in the morning or the evening. I’ve continued the use of bold numerals for PM departures for another visual indicator of time. As I’ve had pointed out to me, Amtrak uses 12-hour time in its timetables because that’s the accepted convention expected by its customers, but I wanted to see how 24-hour times looked in comparison.
An important typesetting trick with tables that have a lot of numbers in columns — timetables, financial reports, etc. — is to make sure you use OpenType fonts and the right settings in InDesign. In InDesign’s OpenType options (set from the flyout menu of the Character palette, or — even better — via a paragraph style), you’ll have the option to make numerals be either “proportional” or “tabular”. For a table, you should always set this to “tabular”. It basically makes all the numbers in the table become monospaced, meaning they all line up perfectly underneath each other in columns, regardless of whether they’re as thin as a “1” or as wide as an “8”. It looks so much better, trust me.
Now, the littlest changes that — for me — make the biggest difference: the layout and organisation of the plethora of icons that are scattered throughout Amtrak’s timetables. For those who are interested, the official Amtrak icons are actually a typeface called “Amtrak Pi”, which I don’t have access to. This is why I had to redraw/substitute my own icons, but it was actually for the better.
Just as numbers in tables benefit from being set so that they form neat columns, so do icons. I created my icons so that they each fit into a common square — sometimes using the whole square, other times just being centred within it. This meant that they could be consistently organised into neat columns of similar icons that could be read down the table as well as across. Amtrak’s table just centres as many “Service” icons as are required within each cell, which makes it difficult to compare those services between stations, as they don’t necessarily line up with each other when reading downwards. Even worse, the order of the icons isn’t consistent: Ashland and South Portsmouth–South Shore stations have the “unstaffed station” and “accessible platform” icons reversed in order compared to all the other stations. In contrast, my icons are neatly and consistently arranged in columns: station staffing in the first column, accessibility in the second, and Quik-Track ticketing in the third column. Any gaps in the columns instantly indicate that a service is not available at that station, and comparison between the two types of staffing and the two types of accessibility at all the different stations can be achieved much more rapidly.
The icons for service on each train are treated similarly, although here the best innovation is simply introducing a small gap between the icons and the arrival/departure time, instead of butting them right up to the numbers, which makes them much harder to read, especially when there’s a “D” on one side and a “P” on the other!
That’s pretty much it! I don’t think this table is perfect by any means, but it definitely makes my point: that a few minor, incremental changes to the presentation of information can make all the difference in helping customers get the information they need to travel more efficiently.
Side note: I have to say that I find it incredibly sad that Cincinnati Union Terminal — once one of the great railway hubs of America — now only services six Amtrak trains per week, and they arrive at the ignoble times of 1:13am (northbound) and 3:17am (southbound).
Not the first Louisville fantasy map that I’ve featured – see Peter Dovak’s map here (March 2013) – but this one takes quite a different approach. It’s certainly grander in scale than Peter’s modest two-line system.
I will say that I adore the colour palette of this map: the muted background, river and parklands are lovely, and work nicely with the route line colours, which are also a little knocked back from the normal solid bright colours used in transit map design. The design reminds me a little of the Washington DC Metrorail (I don’t think the similarity of name is a coincidence?), although with enough differences to make it unique. The square station symbols are unusual, but work relatively well. Also, a lovely and appropriate north pointer, love it!
My main problem with the map is its labelling. As with the DC Metro map itself, we’ve got labels going off in all sorts of directions: horizontally and in all four diagonal directions. And those directions seem to be applied inconsistently: the eastern ends of the Green and Purple lines have horizontal labels, while their united western end has labels that are angled 45 degrees downwards. It just all seems a little haphazard to me. I also think that the labels for the roads and the address subtitles for the stations are too small to be useful – I can’t read them at all, even on the 2000px-wide preview on Marc’s website. That’s normally a pretty good indication of viewing a map from a distance at an actual printed size, so I think some work is needed to improve legibility.
Today’s offering is spurred by news of a new Muni map showing frequency of service. Here’s the one I created for personal amusement in 1982. As you can see, the technology was a bit more primitive: Rapidograph technical pens, a calligraphy pen, and crepe-paper tape on tracing paper. The rest of the page (of a visitors guide I made for friends) was typewritten.
Transit Maps says:
Nice and simple – that’s the way to do it. Just coastline, a few landmarks and route lines which get thicker the more frequent the service is. A quick comparison with the new Muni map reveals that many of the routes still exist in almost identical form some 33 years later.
At the end of April 2015, Amtrak’s Hoosier State service between Chicago and Indianapolis is scheduled to be discontinued — the first complete loss of a service since I created my “Amtrak as Subway Map” way back in 2010. Over the years, I’ve been pretty vigilant to changes to the Amtrak network — adding and deleting stations as required, extending the Downeaster Line to Brunswick and the Northeast Regional to Norfolk — but a change of this magnitude gives me the chance to take a completely fresh look at this project and rework everything from scratch, instead of just tweaking the old diagram again. Let’s face it – I’ve learned a lot of new skills and tricks in the intervening years!
(Note: it now seems that the Hoosier State will be saved, but its potential demise was still the impetus behind this new version of the map.)
Still, my first attempt at a new version proved to be a dead end as I experimented unsuccessfully with 30- and 60- angles. While it worked well enough in the Northeast Corridor, as seen to the left, it rapidly fell apart in the rest of the county, creating a lot of awkward and distracting angles. However, I did like the new typography — utilising the excellent Fira Sans, a huge improvement over the previous Myriad Pro Condensed — and the use of transparency where route lines crossed over each other, which led me on to my next idea.
One thing that had begun to bother me about the previous version was the sheer amount of routes that had to be shown along the Northeast Corridor. There are eleven separate services heading south out of New York Penn Station, and showing them all side by side both took up a lot of space and made the stopping patterns of those services difficult to discern. I hit upon the idea of overlaying services that had identical stopping patterns on top of each other, using multiplied transparency effects to layer the colours up on top of each other.
Out of New York, this condensed the eleven route lines down to a far more manageable four: the “all stations” Northeast Regional and Keystone sharing one line, the Acela Express and Vermonter their own lines, and all of the “long-distance” trains sharing the fourth line: these being the Cardinal,Carolinian, Crescent, Palmetto, Pennsylvanian, Silver Meteor and Silver Star. As these trains diverge toward their final destinations, their actual route colour is revealed, as can be seen here where the magenta Pennsylvanian and teal Keystone lines head east south of Philadelphia. Individually, each of these trains only has one departure daily or fewer (the Cardinal only runs three times a week), but the multiplication of their route colours up to a very strong black helps to imply how their combined service — with departures staggered throughout the day — is itself “multiplied” along the Northeast Corridor. I utilised this effect where appropriate across the rest of the map, except in instances where a line runs concurrently with another route for its entire length. Such instances would mean that line’s signature colour would never actually be seen on the map. In the image above, the Empire Service had to be separated from the Maple Leaf, as they both run with an identical stopping pattern all the way from New York to the Empire Service’s eastern terminus at Niagara Falls.
Another bugbear from the previous map was corrected this time around: getting the label for Chicago Union Station to fit next to the station itself, instead of having to use a line that pointed to the station from afar. Note also that the two-letter name disks for each train now also corresponds with the position each train occupies in the station, instead of jut being listed alphabetically as they were previously. This new approach is used across the map wherever two or more services terminate at a station.
Overall, I think that spacing between stations is now much more even across the entire map. The huge gap between Alexandria and Lorton on the previous version — a by-product of the huge number of lines in the Northeast Corridor that had to be shown — is greatly reduced, and there’s a much more harmonious, even flow all the way down the east coast from Brunswick to Miami. One of my favourite reworks is in Texas (left), where there’s lovely even spacing all the way from Oklahoma City down to San Antonio. I’m really liking the transparency overlay effects here as well. The whole map is simplified even more than before, eliminating unnecessary changes in direction: the Coast Starlight and Amtrak Cascades don’t take fiddly little curves though Oregon and Washington anymore, for example. Elements align with each other more purposefully than before: the three New England routes — the Adirondack, Vermonter and Downeaster — all have their northmost U.S. station aligned vertically with each other (not geographically accurate, but much neater in a diagrammatic layout like this). While it’s unlikely that Sunset Limited service from New Orleans to Orlando will ever be restored post Hurricane Katrina, this map allows for that possibility by setting up a straight horizontal line between New Orleans and Jacksonville, where the Sunset Limited used to join the Silver Service trains for the leg towards Orlando.
Research for this new map uncovered three stations that I never knew existed — two seasonal stations for the New York and North Carolina State Fairs, and one for large, pre-booked groups at the Col. Allensworth State Historic Park in California — as well as two stations that are due to open in 2015 – Holyoke (Vermonter) and Arcadia Valley (Texas Eagle). These have all been added to the map. There’s still more research and tweaking to go before this version of the map is finalised — I think some of the colours may need to be changed to maximise the overlay effect — but I’m pretty excited at the way things are progressing. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it as well.
I have to say that “Dark City” isn’t a movie I’m familiar with, although it had a pretty good cast – Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, Ian Richardson and William Hurt. Let’s see: dystopian future… things aren’t what they seem… memory loss… framed for a crime he didn’t commit… the movie certainly ticks all the “1990s sci-fi movie” boxes, that’s for sure.
Needless to say, “Shell Beach” is integral to the plot – why else the lingering close-up on its subway stop? The map itself is pretty nicely realised for a movie prop that’s only seen for a short time, although there does seem to be a ridiculously large number of routes, all tangled up together. The close-up, however, does give away the fact that the map is an inkjet print on a fairly coarse quality setting, including some less than optimal banding.
