Can we just talk about how beautiful this is?
Source: tokyoform/Flickr
Photo: Tokyo Metro Line Legend
Work in Progress: Making a Grid!
Making a grid! Using existing elements in a design to create a comprehensive, useful grid that can be applied across the rest of the map.
See my Sydney Festival Route Map project page for more information.
Updated DC Metro Veterans Day Map
Update: the Washington DC Metro Veterans Day Map now includes the Rosslyn–Pentagon shuttle bus service (shown as a dotted blue line with relevant call-out box). It’s like they’re reading my mind!
Source: WMATA website – link no longer active
Project: 2015 Sydney Festival Route Map
If you’ve ever been to Sydney in January, then you’ll know that the Sydney Festival is a big deal. Running for almost the entire month, it brings together the very best in the arts from around Australia and the world – music, dance, performance and more. So I was more than a little bit excited when I was commissioned to produce this thematic “route map” of highlighted events, to be used both online and in the Festival’s printed program/brochure.
While the Festival had produced a route map along similar lines in 2014 (left), they were looking to improve upon it and tie it in a little more with their overall branding, so they reached out to me for assistance. My original connection to Sydney certainly helped me get the job, I think!
The brief was quite open – I was given the branding colour palette (which is modern and bold, very appropriate for transit map design!), the fonts to use (Helvetica Neue Condensed), and an Excel spreadsheet of the “route lines” and “stops” with some required “interchange stations” noted. The order of the rest of the stations was left up to me – whatever was needed to make things fit nicely onto the required paper size (296 x 190mm, a little smaller than an A4 sheet).
It only took me a very few preliminary sketches to work out exactly what I wanted to do. The Festival Express line was described as the “essential selection”, so it made perfect sense for it to be a circle line, joining and linking all the other lines. This line had ten stations, with seven of these interchanging with other lines. I spaced these stations evenly around the circle, with an angle of 36 degrees between each one (360°/10 = 36°). This led to the first major design problem that I had to solve – getting these equally spaced stations in the right position so that I could use standard 45-degree route line angles for the rest of the map. Fortunately, this was solved easily by simply rotating all the stations nine degrees clockwise around the circle (36 + 9 = 45), as seen in the following GIF:
Now that the central circle was defined, I could use it and the “key station” as shown above in pink to help define a solid grid to build the rest of the diagram. It’s easier to show this in an image than it is to describe it:
Of course, the final placement of all the route lines was a bit more of a “trial by error” process than this, but the grid was instrumental in helping me make decisions! I also used the grid for the initial placement of station markers, although these were often moved around a bit to fit some longer event names in.
The previous route map had placed each event’s relevant page number from the printed program inside the station circles, which made them quite small and difficult to read. I moved them off the route lines and into colour-coded boxes next to the station labels. I had a bit of fun at interchanges, where the outline of the box becomes a gradient between the two or three colours of the intersecting route lines.
The map only went through a couple of iterations before being signed off on and accepted by the Festival, more than a week ahead of schedule. Personally, I really couldn’t be happier with the final result, and the client absolutely loves it as well.
Historical Map: Proposed City Railway Company Lines, New York, c. 1890s
Cutaway diagram, map, and accompanying text describing the construction of an electric motor-powered rapid transit subway that would have run through the basements of “fire-proofed buildings constructed along the line”. Despite shallow excavations of only nine-and-a-half feet, the blurb promises “no perceptible vibrations from the passage of trains”. Hmmm.
nyplmaps:
The City Railway Company, rapid transit passenger lines [189-?]
This map shows the location of a proposed underground rapid transit line and an “alternative line” in Manhattan and the south west Bronx. There is text describing the proposed line and a section cut diagram of transit tunnels.
Official Map: Veterans Day Service, Washington DC Metro
An interesting modification of the Washington DC Metro map sent my way by a couple of readers. On November 11, there will be no Blue Line trains at all, with those trains instead becoming “special” Yellow Line trains designed to get as many people to the National Mall as quickly as possible. The reason? The “Concert for Valor”, which is expected to draw a staggering 800,000 people (I really feel sorry for those who still have to go downtown to work normally that day).
Smithsonian station will be closed as it is “within the security zone for the concert”. In place of normal Blue Line services, a shuttle train will run between Arlington Cemetery and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport stations, as shown on the map with the unwelcome return of one of the ugly call out boxes that used to litter this map. The shuttle is shown as a dashed pink line, just to really reinforce that This Is Not The Blue Line.
Not shown at all, but described on WMATA’s Veterans Day Service Advisory web page, is a special express shuttle bus between Rosslyn and Pentagon stations. It might have been helpful to actually indicate this bus service on the map, as it allows riders from the western part of the network to access the southern part (and the Arlington Cemetery shuttle train) without having to brave the potentially massive crowds downtown.
Matt’ Johnson (as always, my man on the ground in DC) says that he expects these maps to be posted all over the system and in railcars for the big day… and then “liberated” by passengers as the day wears on.
Our rating: Takes the standard map and makes the required amendments to communicate the one-off service changes reasonably neatly, but really could have included information about the Rosslyn-Pentagon bus to help riders get around the “missing link” in the system more efficiently. Three stars.
UPDATE 10/24: A newer version of the map now includes the shuttle bus information as a blue dotted line with call-out box. Have an extra half star, WMATA!
Source: WMATA Veterans Day Service Advisory page – link no longer active
The “Transit Maps” Blog is Three Today!
Wow! It seems like just yesterday that I made my first post on this blog, yet here we are three years down the road already!
Thanks to each and every follower – over 23,000 on Tumblr*, 1,985 on Twitter, and 716 on my Facebook Page – I really couldn’t have lasted this long without your likes, retweets, reblogs, questions and submissions.
A focus for the upcoming year will definitely be to be more responsive to questions and submissions: my inbox is way too full with stuff that’s way too old – and that’s frustrating for both me and for the people who take the time to submit things to me.
* A frankly ludicrous number that I don’t believe reflects my true number of followers in any way.
Project: McKinney Avenue Trolley Map (Dallas, Texas)
Here’s a small project that was inspired by a message about the currently existing map for the McKinney Avenue heritage trolley line in Dallas, Texas. As you can see in the gallery below, it could use a little help. However, rather than review and criticise a map produced for a non-profit organisation (most likely by a volunteer or staff in their spare time), I thought that I would create a new, accurate, more user-friendly map instead. While produced as a design exercise for my own benefit, I’m hopeful that the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority (MATA) might consider adopting it as their official map.
Current MATA map 
Future Loop 
Future Olive Street
My version of the map retains all the information that was present on the previous one, but I’ve placed everything much more precisely onto a more geographically accurate (although somewhat simplified) base map. I’ve also added a little bit of extra information in the form of contact details (website and phone number) and the general hours of operation. The map was carefully formatted and designed to fit onto a US Letter page with half-inch margins: perfect for printing out at home and bringing along with you for the ride! Great care was taken to keep type legible and clear at this output size — a cause that was helped by the huge x-height of the typeface used (Good Headline Pro Condensed).
Stop names are generally labelled as the road the route line is on, referenced to the nearest cross street. There are a few exceptions made when there’s no nearby cross street, or there’s an important landmark close to the stop, like the Dallas Art Museum or the Magnolia Theater. I located all 38 existing stops by “riding” along the route in Google Street View and pinpointing their exact location (which wasn’t always the same as the map view would have had me believe). One final stop – at Cityplace West and McKinney Avenue – proved quite elusive, until an actual MATA operator pointed me in the right direction.
Physically, the map shows an area that’s only 1.5 miles wide by 2 miles deep, so I’ve tried hard to convey the sense of a small, local neighbourhood. A quarter-mile grid overlays the entire map for a quick sense of this intimate scale. DART transit stops – while still shown on the map – have been pushed lower down in the information hierarchy, as I feel their usefulness for local connections is limited in the context of this map. Their presence is only there to remind us that this part of Dallas is connected with the greater metropolis. Instead, I’ve placed a greater emphasis on parkland and the Katy Trail, a popular multi-use (bike/pedestrian) path that links Downtown and Uptown. The trail seems to be a huge part of the urban fabric of this part of Dallas, and its inclusion furthers the theme of local community in the map.
I’ve also made two further versions of the map (shown in the gallery above) that encompass the next two phases of the streetcar line: (1) a spur line down Olive Street that will eventually join up with the original route to form (2) a loop through the Arts District. The locations for the stations on these future maps were guesstimated from the original MATA map, so may be subject to change. The Olive Street spur is under construction right now, and may be opening very soon (although an actual date is difficult to pin down).
If you like the map, please feel free to download a PDF via the button at the bottom of the page. If you find it useful, please let me know. If any future updates to the maps are made, they’ll be posted here. Comments, as always, are welcome.
UPDATE – January 2015: MATA have adopted my map as their official route map on their website! (PDF link)
Tutorial: Drawing Complex Highway Interchanges in Illustrator
This is kind of a tangent to my normal tutorials, but I had a surprising number of requests for this after I published my McKinney Avenue Trolley map, so here goes!
The first thing to note is that this is not a 100-percent accurate representation of the interchange: this trolley map is not intended to be a road map or to be used to navigate freeways. I want to communicate the idea of an interchange stack and show general connections, but I’ve left some of the fiddly detail out. However, this technique stands up pretty well to any level of detail required: it’s just a matter of how patient you are.
Let’s run through this step by step:
START
This just shows my base layers before any of the complex stuff starts. At the very bottom, there would be a some sort of source image template for tracing elements from (which I’m not showing to improve clarity), then the background colour layer, then two road layers. In this part of Dallas, some parts of the highways are actually lower than the surface roads, so they come first (in a layer called “Hwy Low”), then a “Streets” layer for those surface roads.
A note here on colours. I actually define separate global colours for the different types of roads I need to show on a map, so that I can easily tell them apart while working. So, as shown here, there’s yellow for freeways/highways, white for surface roads and blue for freeway ramps. When I’m done, I can simply re-edit all these global colours to achieve the final look of the map (in this case, all roads end up being white). I also define a “road edge” colour for the stroke that separates the different level of roads (black in its working mode, the same colour as the background in the final piece).
STEP 1
I’ve added a layer for those parts of the highways that are elevated above the surface roads, called “Hwy Up”. Once I’ve drawn the paths for the roads, I’ve copied them and sent them to the back (a quick Cmd/Ctrl-C, Cmd/Ctrl-B combo) and changed their stroke from a 6pt “highway yellow” to an 8pt “road edge” black.
Here’s the first of my clever tricks for this type of work: the top yellow line has a rounded cap end, while the lower black line has a flat cap end (these are defined in the Strokes panel). If both of them had a flat cap end, then you can often see a tiny thin sliver of black extending past the end of the yellow, especially with PDF output. It’s tricky to see with this image, but I’ve circled a deliberate example of this in “Step 2” above. If both strokes have round ends, then the black stroke extends all the way around the yellow one, which we don’t want. Having a round cap above the flat cap hides it effectively every time.
STEPS 3 THROUGH 5
Now it’s just a matter of adding all the desired freeway ramps and overpasses, working your way up from lowest in elevation to the highest. You can do this all in one layer if you’re confident in Illustrator, or you can make separate layers for each level as you go up. I thinned my ramps down to 4pt wide, with a 6pt “road edge” stroke behind them. The outside edge of the ramp stroke needs to line up pretty precisely with the outside edge of the freeway stroke below it: this probably takes the most practice to get right on a consistent basis.
You’ll note in the images above that even though the “road edge” stroke should cross over and be visible above the highway that’s on a lower layer, it isn’t. This is my second little trick: I use an opacity mask on the strokes where required to hide parts of them from view.
If you haven’t used opacity masks in Illustrator before, then I highly encourage you to do some research and make them a part of your workflow. Basically, you draw a 100-percent black object that defines the area that you want to be masked, making sure it’s placed above the stroke in the stacking order. Then, select both the stroke and the mask object and click the “Make Mask” button in the Transparency palette (you might also have to uncheck the “Clip” check box to make things show up as you expect).
It’s certainly not as intuitive as masking in Photoshop, but it saves having to shuffle things around layers in an often futile attempt to get them behind some objects while still being in front of others. In the images above, I’ve shown the masks I’ve used for each stroke as a magenta box, just to give an idea of what’s required.
Note: You could also use the simpler Clipping Mask function to achieve the same end result, although here you have to draw a masking object that covers what you want to be visible after masking, not what you want hidden. I personally find it easier to draw a small object over the tiny part I want to hide, rather than a large object that encompasses the rest of the relevant stroke.
STEP 6
We could really call things done after finishing Step 5, but I wanted to give the freeway ramps and overpasses a little more dimensionality and depth. I do this by copying “road edge” strokes where they cross lower layers and then pasting them behind. I cut them using the scissors tool so that I’m only left with the pieces that are required, then I just nudge them a few points directly down the page to give the illusion of depth. These are shown in green in Step 6 above.
FINISH
Now it’s just a matter of redefining the working global colours for each element to achieve the final look. For this map, that means changing all the road elements to be white, and the “road edge” colour to match the background colour. Beautiful!
See also: all my tutorials related to transit map design.
Future Map: Proposed Extension to the Bakerloo Tube Line, London
Very much in TfL’s house style, even as a more geographical map. Mainly interesting because it’s a major expansion of the Tube south of the Thames, which has historically been underserved by the Underground.
If you live in London and want to have say in the routing of this line, then you should go and take TfL’s survey. More information on the project can be found here, where I also sourced this image from.