All posts tagged: Europe

Unofficial Map: Unified Transit Map of Riga, Latvia by Viteks Bariševs

January 13, 2012
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Yesterday morning, I got an interesting email from Viteks Bariševs in response to my assertion that transit maps rarely show completely different transit modes (bus and rail, mainly) on the same map due to their differing natures. He is working on a totally unified transit map for Riga – and that includes showing a staggering 53 bus routes, 19 trolleybus routes and 9 tram routes – a monumental task! His map certainly looks impressive, showing […]

Unofficial Map: Paris RER Line B as the Eiffel Tower by Sonoko Hagiwara

January 12, 2012
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Words cannot express just how much I love this cleverly thought of, deftly executed and incredibly cute rendering of Paris’ RER Line B as the Eiffel Tower. Hagiwara has drawn her inspiration from the official RER line diagram, with the bifurcation of the line becoming the “legs” of the tower. Almost seems like a clever advertisement for the RER, and only took her 20 minutes to execute! Source: Sonoko Hagiwara – link no longer active

Historical Map: “Hutchison” London Tube Map, 1960

January 7, 2012
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Requested by: My dad (whose love of transit maps I have inherited) The London Tube Map is so synonymous with the name Harry Beck that I feel sure many people think he’s still holed up in a studio somewhere working on the maps even now (he died in 1974). In actuality, Beck’s last published Tube map was released in 1959: in 1960 it was replaced by this new version, ostensibly made by London Transport’s own […]

Unofficial Map: Integrated Transit Map of Kiev, Ukraine by Igor Skliarevsky

December 29, 2011
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Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to post until the New Year, but I couldn’t wait to show this exciting new map of transit in Kiev, Ukraine. This beautiful diagram was designed by Igor Skliarevsky in his own time, simply because he was frustrated with the limitations and design of the official map. As he says on his website (pardon the Google Translate from Ukrainian), “As a designer, I find it difficult to […]

Historical Map: George Dow Diagram of LNER Great Northern Suburban Services, 1929

December 13, 2011
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Almost everyone credits Harry Beck with “inventing” the diagrammatic transit map in 1933 with his iconic London Underground map. But the diagram form had already been in use for a number of years before that, as shown in this delightful 1929 diagram for LNER suburban services out of London’s Kings Cross station to points north. It was designed by George Dow, who created many such diagrams for the LNER. His son, Andrew Dow, wrote a […]

Official Map: Copenhagen S-Tog Map, 2011

December 9, 2011
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Some transit maps are geographically based, others are diagrams. But what happens when you get a map with too much diagram? That’s what we have with Copenhagen’s S-Tog (S-Train) map: it looks gorgeous, but at what cost to usability? Have we been there? Yes, but I didn’t use the S-Tog system. I arrived and left by long-distance trains from/to Berlin, and caught a regional train out to Roskilde to visit the Viking Ship Museum ( […]

Fantasy Map: Deutsche Bahn ICE Network as a U-Bahn Map

December 9, 2011
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Clever work here from the German office of Ogilvy Advertising, taking the familiar iconography of a typical German-styled U-Bahn map and applying it — and its associated promises of rapid, frequent service — to the Germany-wide ICE (high-speed train) network. My only problem with this work is that the shape of the network bears little resemblance to Germany itself, probably because of the landscape format of the bilboard. Source: Viralbuzz.de and Design Made in Germany