Submitted by Hayden, who says:

An interesting map of Paris’ Métro and RER network found in a restaurant in Montreal. The map’s designers seem to have made the most of a limited color palette by assigning the same color to groups of lines that do not intersect–lavender for 2, 8, and 3b, brown for 11 and 6, magenta for 12 and 7, etc. Unfortunately it seems they could not avoid breaking this rule at Strasbourg-St. Denis.

The best I can date this map is to between Dec. 1982 (Line 7 opens a new branch to Le Kremlin – Bicetre) and Feb. 1985 (this branch is extended).

Transit Maps says:

The first thing to note that this diagram – which I believe was designed as a postcard by C. Spandonide (see name at bottom left) – is very old and faded from being on this restaurant’s walls for goodness knows how long. Here’s another copy of it on Flickr that shows what it originally looked like. Note that it’s dated to 1984, which seems about right.

That said, Hayden’s comment about the limited colour palette still holds true. Despite being printed as four-colour process (which allows for almost any tint or shade desired), the Métro routes are shown in only six hues – yellow, red, green, blue, brown and purple. The yellow and blue used for the RER lines are ever-so-slightly different to those used for the Metro lines, but it’s still an interesting design decision. It’s even more interesting when this diagram is compared to a contemporaneous official RATP “Micro” diagram designed by Patrice Rouxel.

Look closely – you can see that there is the exact same breakdown of six colours assigned to the Metro lines on both maps, though some of the colours used are slightly different. So, red on the Spandonide diagram relates to pink on the Rouxel diagram and these colours are both assigned to lines 7 and 12. And so on: green is to light green for lines 4, 7b and 9; blue is to aqua for lines 5 and 13, etc. What we can infer from this is that this is simply how the lines were officially designated at this point in time. The Spandonide map has simply tweaked the hues slightly, perhaps to avoid copyright or licensing issues? The modern pastel route colours that we now know so well simply weren’t in use in 1984.

The unavoidable double-up of green at Strasbourg–St. Denis isn’t too bad as the lines cross at right angles, neatly avoiding any potential confusion. The diagram itself is a valiant effort to fit a complex network into a very small space, even using the black border to contain information about destinations off the edge of the diagram! All things considered, the labels are quite legible – and for once, all-caps is probably a good idea, as lower-case characters could perhaps be too hard to read at such a small point size.