Wow! I've been completely blown away by the (mostly positive) response to my redrawn Tube Map. Thanks to everyone who has left me a comment or note – all of your thoughts help to inform future revisions to the map. There's a few more parts of the map that I'm personally really happy with that I'd like to highlight in a little more detail than the already lengthy initial post allowed. Read on for the details!
London's Tube Map has long been regarded as an icon of informational design, pioneering the way for just about every other schematic transportation map in the world since its inception way back in 1931. But how much of that reputation is actually deserved these days?
A digital recreation of one of my absolute favourite vintage transit maps, with a couple of bonus variants at the end of the post!
Here’s a sneak peek at a little weekend project… coming along nicely, I must say! I’m particularly pleased with the all-vector halftone dots, which have a lovely organic feeling to them that suit the original source material nicely. More soon!
Question: Are there any resources available for exporting city map data (similar to Google Maps, etc) to vector format for importing into Illustrator? Do you utilize any pre-existing data for your projects, or do you simple start from scratch? I’m thinking of your Dallas streetcar map in particular. Answer: To be honest, most of the time, I just start from scratch. My very low-tech workflow is to quickly grab some screenshots from Google Maps or similar […]
Based on feedback from the first draft of this new version of my Amtrak as subway map, I’ve gone and made a few edits, additions and corrections. The major revision is a reworking of the main section of the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington to make things a little clearer. I’m still using overlapping “multiplied route colour” lines to indicate identical service patterns, but I’ve broken the routes down into smaller, thematically linked groups: the three […]
At the end of April 2015, Amtrak's Hoosier State service between Chicago and Indianapolis is scheduled to be discontinued — the first complete loss of a service since I created my "Amtrak as Subway Map" way back in 2010. Over the years, I've been pretty vigilant to changes to the Amtrak network — adding and deleting stations as required, extending the Downeaster Line to Brunswick and the Northeast Regional to Norfolk — but a change of this magnitude gives me the chance to take a completely fresh look at this project and rework everything from scratch, instead of just tweaking the old diagram again. Let's face it – I've learned a lot of new skills and tricks in the intervening years!
If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then H.C. Beck must have been blushing when this diagram of railway services in Sydney, Australia was produced in 1939. Designed just six years after Beck's famous London Underground diagram first appeared, it mimics the original's style almost perfectly. As scans of this map on the Internet had quality issues, I decided to redraw it in Adobe Illustrator from scratch.
While doing research for my recent 1947 Interstate Highways map recreation, I stumbled across some scans 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.
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 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!
