Submission – Fantasy Map: Southern Ontario Frequent/Rapid Transit Map by Jimmy Wu

December 23, 2014
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Submitted by Jimmy, who says:

I had initially completed this fantasy map of the rapid and frequent transit networks in and around Toronto and Ottawa in early 2014, but I was a bit hesitant to ask you to review it because it is one of the first transit maps I’ve made; now that the year is over, I would appreciate a review with some possible feedback that I can implement in a possible new iteration. Some things to note: I chose to include routes that were fast and/or frequent; ideally, every route denoted on this map with the exception of the regional rail lines would have frequencies of 10 minutes or less. The numbering of the routes is inconsistent because I haven’t given much thought into whether the operation of all the services would be integrated; I had only intended to illustrate the routes as those that can be accessed with the PRESTO fare payment card (which is why I have left out some route numbers in many ‘Terminating Services’ boxes, and in the legend).

Transit Maps says:

One of the first transit maps you’ve made, Jimmy? Wow. Seriously, this is super impressive work. There’s a great visual hierarchy, with each mode clearly and easily differentiated from each other (the “double stroke” for light rail is particularly effective). Definitely puts me in mind of this great Paris/Île-de-France map (Jan 2014, 4.5 stars), which sets the standard for this type of multimodal transit diagram in my eyes.

There’s a bit of a dichotomy between your stated goal of showing frequent services and the depiction of the regional rail – it’s the most visually prominent service and has the thickest line stroke, but actually has the least frequent service. On a true frequency map, thicker lines are used to indicate more service, not less. That said, an addition to the legend of expected headways for each service would suffice to indicate service frequency, as I do like the way that the regional rail forms a strong visual backbone for the map.

You do need to work out what your route numbering system is going to be and apply it consistently to the map and the legend. It makes finding the numerous routes easier, and is essential for assisting colour-blind users.

A minor nit-pick: where light rail lines split in two (like with the ION light rail in Waterloo), you need to indicate direction of travel along the two separate segments.

I’ll also note that this map is physically huge – 74″ x 46″ (or 188cm x 118cm) – with some really tiny type. Not ideal for printing out, but fine for viewing as a PDF on a screen where the map can be zoomed in to show greater detail.

Our rating: Looks gorgeous with great visual flow and hierarchy. Just needs some usability tweaks to be truly excellent. Four well-earned stars.

Photo: Budapest Metro Line 4 Strip Map

December 23, 2014
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At Moricz Zsigmond korter station. One of my favourite on-platform strip maps. There’s no ambiguity at all about which stations you can reach from each side of the platform, and the current station is clearly highlighted. Lovely work.

Source: Romeodesign/Flickr

Historical Map: “Wonders of New York” by Nils Hansell, c. 1953-1955

December 20, 2014
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Here’s a gorgeous and beautifully detailed map of New York (well, Manhattan, but at least it says there are “many places of interest on the other side of the river”!). It was designed by Nils Hansell, a graphic designer and sailing enthusiast who also worked for some years at IBM (according to the blurb over at the site I found the map, anyway).

As well as some 300-odd numbered points of interest (as seen in the detail image above), it also features a neat little schematic of the subway system in Manhattan at the lower right of the map, still divided up into the three operating companies – BMT (Green), IND (Red) and IRT (Blue).

The map also shows the last vestiges of New York’s once-extensive elevated railway lines: the Third Avenue El, which looks like it’s been cut back to its final southern terminus at Chatham Square. Previously, branches went all the way down to South Ferry (closed in 1950) and City Hall (closed in 1953). In 1955, elevated rail service in Manhattan ended, which gives us a pretty good date for this map of somewhere between 1953 and 1955.

Source: David Rumsey Map Collection

Official Map: New Mexico Rail Runner Commuter Rail (“Desktop” Version)

December 19, 2014
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Following up on the previous post about the “mobile” version of the Rail Runner map – the one that gets served to smartphones and tablets when they’re browsing the mobile version of Rio Metro’s website – here’s the “desktop” version (what you see on a real computer).

Overall, it’s a little better in my eyes. The similar-looking connection icons are a little larger on this map (big enough that I can see it’s a pair of dice on the casino shuttle, not poker chips as I previously thought!), so they’re not as much of a problem here. I still think that simpler, less literal icons would work better – just the dice without the clutter of the bus for the casino connection, for example – but it’s an improvement of sorts.

On this map, each station is represented by its own unique icon – mainly architectural, but with a few historical or flora/fauna icons thrown in as well. They’re nicely drawn, but a little indistinct at smaller sizes. It took me a while to make out the “hummingbird drinking out of a flower” icon, for example.

The one really glaring aspect of this map is the decision to make the Rail Runner’s route line exactly the same colour and thickness as the highways, making them almost impossible to tell apart. The route line would look great in red on the nicely textured grey background.

 I’m also not really in favour of the all caps Bank Gothic labels for the station names: it takes up a lot of room and makes things harder to read, and also clashes stylistically with the Myriad used elsewhere on the map.

Our rating: Better than the mobile version: a pretty solid effort. Three stars.

Source: Rio Metro’s desktop website

NEWS: Official 2012 Vignelli New York Subway Diagram Posters Available For Purchase!

December 17, 2014
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If you ever wanted your own copy of the latest iteration of this design classic, here’s your chance. The newly-formed design firm of Waterhouse Cifuentes (founded by Massimo Vignelli’s collaborators Yoshiki Waterhouse and Beatriz Cifuentes) is now offering superb prints on their SuperWarmRed Designs website.

As the description on the website says:

This poster of the MTA New York City Subway Diagram was designed in 2012 by Vignelli Associates and is used in the MTA’s Weekender website and app. Using concepts from Massimo Vignelli’s iconic Subway Map design of 1972, the new diagram was informed by satellite data and rebuilt for greater clarity and legibility. Revised to reflect the current subway system, colors and nomenclature, the poster has been printed in vivid Pantone and Hexachrome inks on acid-free archival cover-weight paper. While supplies last. (36″ x 45″ unframed)

These stunning posters are priced as you might expect a highly collectible, limited edition print of a design classic to be: standard posters are $300, while a poster signed by Massimo Vignelli, Waterhouse and Cifuentes will set you back $1,200. Sadly, out of my price range unless all my readers want to chip in a few dollars each and buy me a nice Christmas present (a man can dream, right?)

One thing’s for sure: the print quality is absolutely impeccable. PANTONE inks plus Hexachrome inks! As a tweet from the firm to me says, this was a very deliberate decision, designed to escape the very limited colour gamut of traditional CMYK printing. It’s a decision that has paid off, as the colours look super vibrant and crisp in the preview images.

Standard Poster – $300 | Autographed Poster – $1,200

Submission – Official Map: New Mexico Rail Runner Commuter Rail

December 16, 2014
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Submitted by Isaac Fischer, who says:

The New Mexico Rail Runner has two versions of the system map. This version (a few years old; the Montaño station is now open) is my favorite – I definitely approve of Rio Metro’s design style. However, I have a few issues: first, the thin, gray lines shown in the background are bus routes. Since the train route is presented as a straight line, this makes it difficult to make the bus routes correspond to the train. (Albuquerque is all right, but in Santa Fe they had to rotate the entire bus network, and they had to make NM-599 a horseshoe shape.) What do you think of the map? And what do you think of the conflict between the linear route and the actual geography?

Transit Maps says:

Interestingly, the New Mexico Rail Runner website serves up two completely different system maps depending on whether you access the site on a desktop computer or a mobile device.

This is the “mobile” map, and while it makes sense to have a simpler map for smartphones/tablets, it’s never a great idea to have an out of date map (like this one) on one platform but not on the other (the “desktop” map shows the open Montaño station). It’s also arguable as to whether this map is actually simpler. It does have a nice straight route line (which is great in theory but spoiled somewhat by the hackneyed “railroad track” effect applied to the path), but the road grid/bus routes behind each stop are simply ludicrous. They’re of absolutely no use at all and simply serve to add background clutter to the map. The connecting bus service icons already do the necessary work, and they could be further enhanced with the addition of route numbers instead of the ridiculous background web of bus routes.

Speaking of the icons, they could really use some work to simplify and differentiate them from each other. Three very similar bus icons and three very similar shuttle icons don’t make for immediate comprehension. And what is that superimposed over the casino shuttle icon? I’m guessing poker chips based on context, but visually it could be just about anything circular. The circular shapes are all of 8 pixels high on the final map – simplify, simplify, simplify!

Our rating: I’m certainly not as happy with this as Isaac is, as I feel that the designer has taken something very simple and overworked it a bit. The end result is tolerable, but there’s a lot of unnecessary background noise and visual clutter. Two-and-a-half stars.

Source: Rio Metro mobile website

Official Map: METRO Light Rail/BRT Network, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota

December 15, 2014
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Submitted by Ethan Osten, who says:

These have started appearing on METRO trains in Minneapolis-St. Paul. I’d love to hear your opinion of them. Previously, the only maps which appeared in stations/trains were the strip maps (March 2014, 3.5 stars) you reviewed earlier this year.

Transit Maps says:

Unfortunately, this map seems like a bit of a backwards step from those previously featured strip maps, which were quite excellent. While I appreciate that the map is trying to show the locations of the stations in a more spatially accurate manner – the Green Line runs east-west, the Blue Line runs to the south, etc. – it’s not a particularly elegant or visually pleasing solution. There’s a lot of wasted space, and the neighbourhood labels are too vague to be of any real use. Adding the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers to the map would have helped a lot in giving context and scale to the layout of the routes. It would also be nice to know where the Northstar Commuter Rail Line actually goes (either in the legend, or as a pointer off the top of the map), and I have no idea why you’d order the routes as LRT/BRT/LRT in the legend (group like services together!).

Our rating: Certainly usable, but disappointingly plain, drab and uninspiring. Two-and-a-half stars.

Project: Prototype U.S. Highways Shield (1926), Digital Recreation

December 14, 2014
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While doing research for my recent 1947 Interstate Highways map recreation, I stumbled across some scans (PDF link – 0.3MB) of American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) road sign specifications dated from the 1920s. The very first page has a dimensioned drawing of the then brand new U.S. Highways shield that I find extremely interesting, as it doesn’t quite match the the shield as it actually first appeared on real world signage in 1927. Some further research seemed to reveal that this drawing is of a design prototype (of a theoretical Route 56 in Maine) that AASHO discussed in meetings during 1926. The drawing itself is pretty rough, with dimensions that don’t match the actual size of the drawing and completely different shapes for each side of the now-familiar six-point shield, so I redrew it accurately according to the given dimensions in Illustrator.

I had to compromise a bit with the shape of the shield because the left and right sides were drawn so differently in the original drawing, but it seems to be a very similar shape to the final 1927 specifications; perhaps with just a little less scalloping with the top curve on each side. As seen in the comparison image above, the main differences between this prototype and the 1927 version are the thickness of the black borders, which are 3/4″ and go right to the edge of the cutout shield shape. By 1927, these had been reduced to just 3/8″ and were inset a further 3/8″ in from the edge of the cutout. I suspect that this was a production-based decision, as many early shields were embossed by a die before being painted, and embossing right to the edge of the shield may have been problematic.

The  1927 shield also uses a simpler, squared off “S” instead of the rounded version seen in the 1926 prototype, and the height of the “US” lettering was reduced to 2″ from 2-1/8″. The height of the route number remains constant at 5″, but the form of the slab type is a little different. Overall, the prototype looks a bit dark, heavy-handed and unbalanced compared to the “classic” 1927 version, but it’s certainly interesting to see one of the earliest steps in the shield’s evolution.

1948 saw the replacement of the simple “slab” typeface with the Standard Alphabet for Roadway Signage (also known as the FHWA Series or Highway Gothic), while the 1961 revision dropped both the state name and the cutout shield in favour of a larger route number and a square sign with a black background behind the shield shape. The last revision in 1970 changed the shape of the shield itself, allowing for more usable width (and wider numbers) within the shape.

Project: 1947 Map of Interstate Highways, Digital Recreation

December 10, 2014
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Prints from $27 + shipping

Having found and digitally restored the fantastic 1926 map of the U.S. Highway system,  I started to look around to see if I could find a similar map from the advent of the newer Interstate Highway network. However, all my usual sources (the Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other online research libraries) came up with either nothing or only low resolution scans — certainly nothing suitable for reproduction.

So, what’s a map-obsessed graphic designer to do in this situation? Why, redraw the whole thing faithfully from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, of course!

Getting started, I was very fortunate to have some great assistance via Twitter that helped me on my way. Firstly, big thanks to Eric Fischer, who kindly uploaded a decent resolution scan of the 1947 Interstate Highways planning map to Flickr for me. The image isn’t perfect by any means, being spliced together from two separate scans of photocopies from a library book, but was more than good enough to act as a template for this.

Then, Brad Mohr pointed out that the strangely-regular-but-not-quite-typeset labels on the map looked like they’d been made with a  Kueffel + Esser Leroy lettering scriber and templates, which was a huge breakthrough for matching the map’s aesthetics. A quick search on MyFonts revealed Planscribe NF, an almost perfect match for the labels (based as it is off those original K+E templates).

After that, it was just a matter of carefully replicating the map. I tried to do much of the work manually – without resorting to defaults in Illustrator – in an attempt to capture the spirit of the original as much as possible. This meant that I manually letterspaced all the labels to match the (often idiosyncratic) spacing of the original, and drew the dashed state border lines without using Illustrator’s automatic dashes function at all. This allowed me to see where the original designer had made decisions on where to shorten or lengthen dashes to fit around labels or add definition to where multiple states abut. All up, this recreation probably took me about 15–20 hours to complete, and most of that was drawing fiddly coastline. The only change I made from the original map was to correct the spelling of Coeur d’Alene in Idaho.

If anything, my version is just a little too perfect, as the modern tools at my disposal make everything so easy. If I want to draw a 3-point wide line for one of the proposed highway routes, I just set the Pen Tool up in Illustrator, and away I go, drawing bezier curves to my heart’s content. I can continue to tweak and edit my path long after I’ve initially drawn it to make things perfect. So easy. Meanwhile, the original cartographer almost certainly used a ruling pen (which is basically a set of calipers with ink manually inserted between the two blades, held there by surface tension alone – every bit as difficult to use as it sounds) and a set of good old french curves to draw his route lines. One mistake, and the whole map could be ruined.

Even the K+E lettering scriber – an amazing tool in its day – seems ridiculously awkward and clumsy today. Tracing letterforms one by one, moving the whole set up after each letter, filling the tiny ink reservoir again and again, meticulously cleaning it all up after you’ve finished… absurd. Recreating this map has definitely given me a greater appreciation of the skills and patience that cartographers of the day possessed… and thankfulness that I live in a digital age with tools that don’t need cleaning fluid applied after each use.

This map was so good, however, that when they needed a map in 1957 to show how the Interstates would be numbered, they just dusted this one off and plopped the route numbers on top, even though some of the routes had been modified in the intervening decade.