All posts tagged: design

Review: New York Subway and Paris Métro Architecture and Design Maps by Blue Crow Media

December 8, 2019
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Transit Maps previously reviewed Blue Crow’s London Underground Architecture and Design Map back in 2017, and they’ve just released two new maps in the series celebrating Paris and New York’s transit systems (there’s also another map in the series for Moscow). As before, the maps are simple but elegant in their execution, with a geographical map of the system on one side and the explanatory text and photos on the other. They come in handsome […]

Review: London Underground Architecture and Design Map by Blue Crow Media

November 25, 2017
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Blue Crow Media is an independent publisher of beautifully designed city guide maps on many subjects – you may be familiar with their “Brutalist Architecture” series – and this new map is the first in a planned series of maps about public transportation networks around the world. Edited by Mark Ovenden (of Transit Maps of the World fame) with some lovely photos by Will Scott, the map promises to be an authoritative guide to the design and architecture […]

Official Map: A Line Opening Poster, Minneapolis by Kevin Cannon

June 2, 2016
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Via: kevincannonart: Metro Transit asked me to create a map celebrating the new A Line. Posters will be available during the grand opening festivities on June 11. Here’s a great poster by artist Kevin Cannon for the opening of Minneapolis’ curious new “BRT-lite” A Line bus service. While it will have 10 minute headways, branded buses (with WiFi, because god forbid we live two seconds of our life without fast Internet), and stops with nice station-like […]

Reader Question: Have You Seen the Interview with the Designer of the London Underground Map?

May 27, 2016
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Question: Have you seen the interview Londonist did with the designer of the new London Underground map? Really fascinating! Answer: I sure have! If anyone hasn’t seen it yet, then head over to the Londonist website and watch the interview here.  Personally, I wish it was more in-depth and technical, but that’s because I’m a total and utter transit map-making nerd who loves that kind of stuff. The interview does make a couple of very […]

Historical Map: Original MBTA “Spider” Map

February 19, 2015
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Taken from Cambridge Seven Associates’ 1965 Manual of Guidelines and Standards. A design classic in its purest form, only slightly marred by the poor registration in the manual itself (the dots should all be centred along each route line). Source: MIT Libraries

Reader Question: Which of Beck’s London Underground Maps Do You Prefer?

February 17, 2015
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Question: Which of Beck’s maps of the London Underground do you most prefer, and what properties does it have that elevate it above the others in your opinion as a designer? Answer: My absolute favourite Beck-drawn Tube Map is actually his unpublished 1961 Victoria Line proposal, which I wrote about in this post back in 2012. Go take a look at it – it’s simply gorgeous, with an arrow-straight lavender Victoria Line cutting directly across […]

Reader Question: Do You Know What the Organizational Principle is for Layering Subway Lines on the NYC Map?

February 12, 2015
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Question: Do you know what the organizational principle is for layering subway lines on the current NYC map? I received a question from meltedchandelier​ yesterday that asked: Hi, I’m hoping you can solve a query that a friend and I have been able to figure out forever. Do you know what the organizational principle is for layering certain NYC subway lines on top of others where they intersect on the current version of the map […]

New Adobe Illustrator “Join Tool” Aids Transit Map Design!

October 17, 2014
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When Adobe Illustrator finally introduced “Live Corners” in January of this year, I was overjoyed. They’d taken one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks in transit mapping – generating properly nested sets of rounded corners where route lines changed direction – and turned it into something intuitive, quick and 100-percent accurate every time. However, it didn’t solve every problem. Joining two separate paths into one (so that Live Corners could be applied to the […]

Work in Progress: McKinney Avenue Trolley Map – Current Service

October 14, 2014
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My Transit Maps, Unofficial Maps
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This is pretty much the finished product, I think, barring any major errors. The MATA website states that there are 38 trolley stops along the route, but I can only find 37, even after multiple “drives” along the entire route in Google Street View.  I changed the background colour from silver to beige after doing some prints: the whole thing just looked too drab and grey once on paper. This works much better and make […]