A light-hearted and off-beat map/infographic for you today – one that shows the distance, type and cost of public toilets near metro stations in Stockholm, Sweden. Hopefully, the map was not borne out of Pruek’s inability to find a facility when in dire need!

The graphic is nicely put together, and functions well as both a (simple) transit map and an informational graphic. It has one of the nicest examples of “candy-striping” the route lines that I’ve seen in a while where the Red and Green lines share track. I’m not normally a big fan of this approach, but it works very nicely here.

The use of line length and colour-coding to denote distance to the toilet of your choice is really nice, giving two visual indicators for this very important piece of information. The one thing I’m pretty certain the graphic doesn’t do is indicate which direction to go to find the toilet, which could be a problem for people unfamiliar with the area who really, really need to go! Maybe a small arrow pointing the way could work, although that might be hard to integrate with such a schematic diagram. There’s certainly plenty of white space in the graphic to work on a solution.

The icons for each type of facility are nicely done, and the price indicator (open, half-filled and filled circles for each price point) is very intuitive. I’m not entirely sure I agree with the decision to flip the icons vertically when they’re under a distance line: it looks a little strange to me.

And is it just me, or does the second icon for a “stand alone toilet” look like a dead ringer for the TARDIS?

Source: Pruek’s portfolio website – link no longer active