All posts tagged: Europe

Historical (Unofficial?) Map: Transit of Sofia, Bulgaria, 2009

November 9, 2016
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Well, this is a bit of a mess, isn’t it? It looks like the map’s designers have attempted to represent the network isometrically, with the city’s grand avenues surrounding the historical central core. However, the whole thing’s just so darn busy that the attempted illusion just doesn’t work. Almost every part of the map is filled with something: labels, logos, clip art, photos of landmarks, even randomly-placed pictures of trams! I’m guessing that the map […]

Submission – Shannon Cave “Transit Map” Mug by deathandthepenguin

November 5, 2016
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Submitted by the author, who says: Not a transit map, but a cave map inspired by Harry Beck I made a few years ago. Transit Maps says: This is fun! This map wears its influence very much on its sleeve, with much of the Tube Map’s celebrated visual language lifted directly from the source, but this is still very nicely put together. The one obvious difference is the substitution of what looks like Avant Garde […]

Historical Map: Budapest Metro Map, c. 1980s

October 28, 2016
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A charmingly simple – almost naive – diagram of Budapest’s then three-line Metro as included in a fold-out city map brochure. The rippling water pattern for the rivers is rather lovely, as is the simple but effective three-circle depiction of the main interchange at Deák tér.  The use of large train and ferry icons to depict transportation interchanges is a little vague: the icons are large enough to span between some stations, or are placed […]

Historical Map: Hand-drawn fare zone London Underground Map by Phil Roe, c. 1977

October 14, 2016
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Phil Roe is a London Underground employee with over 40 years of service. While working in ticket offices in the 1970s, he was worried that he was too slow in calculating fares for customers, so he drew up his own fare zone diagrams for each station he worked at. The example below is for Green Park station, and the fares are in pence!  His maps predate the official usage of zones on the Tube Map, […]

Historical Map: French SNCF Rail Network, 1976 by Rudi Meyer

October 10, 2016
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Via long-time correspondent and fellow map-maker Andrew Smithers (check out his Project Mapping website if you haven’t done it yet!) comes this superb diagram of mainline rail services in 1976 France. It was created by famed Swiss designer Rudi Meyer, who was also responsible for the original – and very distinctive – Paris RER map in 1977-1978. The map is certainly very striking, using a bold blue and green colour palette and minimal distractions from […]

Video: “Überlin” Music Video by R.E.M.

September 18, 2016
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Found on the band’s official YouTube channel, though I don’t think it’s the song’s actual official music video: that would be this one.  The song – from R.E.M.’s last studio album, Collapse Into Now – literally references Berlin and the U-Bahn, but isn’t anything remarkable by the band’s high standards, and the motion graphics are fairly average as well. However, I will give them full credit for using FF Transit – the typeface actually designed […]

Visualization: The Commutometer

September 13, 2016
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By now, everyone should know that I love a good isochrone map, so I’ve definitely been having fun with the Commutometer. It’s an online map that uses data from nine transit agencies around the San Francisco Bay Area to show you how far you can get from your currently selected point by public transport in a certain amount of time. It defaults to 30 minutes, but you can set it from anywhere from 5 minutes to […]

Submission – Idealised Edinburgh Tramways Map, c.1940s by Andy Arthur

September 13, 2016
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Submitted by Andy, who says: Hi, I recently got a bit over-fascinated and nostalgic about the old tramways network of Edinburgh and decided it would be fun to plot out a schematic routemap of the old system as it never quite was at some point in the late 1940s. I also had a little bit of fun trying to make it look like it just might have come out of the Corporation Tramways Department, even […]

Data Visualization: “London Heartbeat” by Oliver O’Brien

August 26, 2016
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I’m loving this interactive map by Oliver O’Brien that uses entry and exit data direct from TfL to build a picture of how the Tube across the course of a typical day – with around 5 million rides or so. (The data doesn’t yet include the newly-introduced Night Tube, so things wrap up as the last “day” trains finish their journeys at the moment.)  Watching the day progress is mesmerising enough – especially the flow […]

Historical Map: “Futuroute” Route Selector for Picc-Vic Rail Project, Manchester, 1970s

August 24, 2016
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Everything about this rather fabulous mechanical route selector – a unique piece created to build interest and publicity for the eventually-cancelled rail project – just screams early 1970s modernist design. From the gaudily coloured stripes on the case, to the tightly-spaced sans serif typeface, to the very name itself: “Futuroute” – literally the route for the future! Although I keep wanting to pronounce it as “futuro-route” rather than the intended “futu-route” for some reason… The unit is now […]