Submitted by Thomas, who says:
I felt like Melbourne was so far away because of the Covid-Curtain and desperately wanted to do anything but study for uni this weekend so I made this!
It’s amazing how different the approaches to passenger commute information, up-front legibility and overall design cues differ between the rival cities.
Transit Maps says:
What a fun little project!
What I particularly like is just how far Thomas has taken the “body swap”: the real Melbourne map shows V-Line services out into regional Victoria, so the “Melbourne-ised” Sydney map does the same… whereas the official Sydney map stops at the edges of Greater Sydney, so the “Sydney-fied” Melbourne map follows suit. City Circle becomes City Loop, and vice versa. Line nomenclature gets swapped, and so on. Even service names become more like their adopted homes: V-Line becomes VicLink to mimic NSW’s TrainLink. It’s all rather wonderfully done.
Overall, Thomas has done a great job of recreating each style, although the type for the Melbourne map isn’t quite the right font and should be black instead of dark gray. The big terminus lettering for Cranbourne and Frankston seems unnecessarily cramped, and I really would have liked to see the Stony Point Shuttle line use the exact shade of teal that the Sydney Metro uses – most of the work has already been done by using the same cased line and the superfluous “S” for each station marker… the right colour just would have made everything perfect. The Sydney map is pretty much spot-on, however – even down to the way that lines outside the “zone boundary” get compressed into very tight and unrealistic spaces.
The other main takeaway is just how much this version of Sydney map looks like the pre-2013 CityRail map (September 2012, 3.5 stars), which probably says something about the slightly more generic design language that the current Melbourne map uses: ticks for stations, rounded corner rectangles for interchanges, etc.
Head over to Thomas’ Behance page for more detail on the project.
Source: Thomas Soo/Behance
My only peeve with the Sydney map is that SHL terminates at Campbelltown – it does occasionally continue to Central past Glenfield, but this is quite rare and infrequent, contrary to what’s on this map.