The Underground has been around so long, and its famous Diagram so ingrained in our heads, that we tend to think of it as an immutable object: always the same, never changing. That’s absolutely not so, as this fantastic reworking of the Tube Diagram shows. Shown here are the 40-plus “ghost stations” of the London Underground – stations that once existed as part of the “Tube”, but no longer do, for varying reasons. Some stations […]
Even design classics like the London Tube map have to be flexible enough to cope with change. The escalators to the Northern and Bakerloo lines at Embankment station – yes, the very escalators that can be seen in the previously posted cutaway diagram from 1914 – are going to be completely replaced. The process is going to take 43 weeks starting on January 8 next year. During that time, Northern and Bakerloo trains will pass […]
Cute title. Made back in 2007, so the Circle Line is actually a loop, rather than the… ahh.. paperclip… it is now. Nicely done piece of whimsy. Source: Zach_ManchesterUK/Flickr – link no longer active
This material was sent to me via email by Dennis McClendon, who runs Chicago CartoGraphics, a design firm in the Windy City that specialises in maps and information graphics. His email – which outlines his role in the development of the Chicago “L” map as used in the CTA system map brochure (the first link on this page) – is so fascinating that I’m basically reproducing it in its entirety below. In effect, Dennis is Transit […]
Sent my way by just about everyone this morning, this Lego map is one of five located at Tube stations across London as another part of the Tube’s 150th birthday celebrations. Each map shows the Tube at a different stage of development from the 1920s right through to the version shown here: a near-future map for 2020. Painstakingly assembled from thousands of Lego bricks, the map looks great, although Neil Bennett from Digital Arts notes […]
Made as a wedding gift for two transit nerd friends, this is beautiful work. The artist wasn’t content with just Zone 1 or a simplification: this is the whole map, including the DLR and the Overground with their distinctive white centre-stroked route lines. Click here to view the entire set of photos on Flickr, including lots of work-in-progress shots. Simply stunning! Source: moorina/Flickr
Even though I’m mainly a print designer, I’ve done enough web design work to know how fiddly (yet also powerful) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be. That’s why I’m totally in awe of this incredibly accurate rendition of the Tube Map, created with nothing but code by John Galatini. Not one image file to be seen! Johnston Sans is recreated with a web font, while the symbols for accessibility, National Rail, ferries, the Emirates Airline, […]
I’m totally loving this series of work by Nick Saltmarsh on Flickr. By zooming right in on details of the Tube Map, he makes us take another look at something that’s so familiar and ubiquitous. Check out the full set here. Some are more successful than others, but all are interesting… and some make awesome abstract art pieces.
The Metropolitan Line – first part of what was to become today’s London Underground – was opened on January 9, 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon Street via Kings Cross. See my other posts about the London Underground here. Source: google.co.uk home page
Storylines London’s iconic tube map is transformed into a pit-stop journey through classic styles of storytelling, with the individual tube lines turned into genres and sub genres of literature. The depths of the Northern Line are made over into the aptly named Horror Line. The Bakerloo Line coursing past Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street becomes, of course, the Crime & Mystery Line. And the pink trajectory of the Hammersmith & City is converted to the Romance […]
