Ever since I first created it in 2009, my Interstates as Subway Map diagram has been one of my most popular and enduring designs. It’s consistently the best selling print in the Transit Maps store, and is something I’m incredibly proud of. However, the last major redesign of it was way back in 2011, and it’s definitely starting to show its age. At the time, I really didn’t think I’d still be maintaining and updating […]
I’ve been sworn to absolute secrecy on this project since mid-January, so I’m very excited to finally share it. Early today, Field Notes (the purveyor of beautiful memo and note books) released their latest quarterly limited edition, “Mile Marker,” with cover designs celebrating the Interstate Highway system. Included with subscriptions – and available for separate purchase on the Field Notes website – is an old-school foldable highway map, designed by me in collaboration with the […]
A great old map on a subject matter very dear to my heart – the Interstate Highway System. Produced in 1961 by the Caterpillar Tractor Company, who stood to gain a great deal in the construction work required to complete the network, it shows the proposed completed network in white, sections under construction with blue dashes, and – somewhat counter-intuitively – sections that are open to traffic in red. It’s immediately apparent how little of […]
Submitted by “Sounder Bruce”, who says: A quasi-transit map that shows electric vehicle charging stations in Washington and Oregon, centered around the Interstate 5 corridor. Transit Maps says: I really like the idea behind this map – a simplified road map much in the vein of many of my own mapping projects – but I feel like the execution lets the concept down a little. Because of the stylised “transit map” format, the distances between […]
Pretty much as soon as I finished my monumental Highways of the United States project last year, people started asking me why I hadn't included the two non-contiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii, both of which do actually contain federal highways in one form or another. So, here's Hawaii with all its Interstate goodness.
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!
My Highways of the USA map got a great write up today by Kenneth Field as part of his “MapCarte” series, where he writes about influential and beautiful maps: one map a day for a whole year. My map was No. 273 in the series, and is one of the very few schematic transit maps featured so far in the series (MapCarte No.1, way back at the beginning of the year was Beck’s original 1933 […]
I’m very pleased to report that full production of the 44″ x 72″ Highways of the United States posters has begun. I’d like to thank everyone who has ordered so far for their patience as we got this process up and running. As you can see from the attached video, printing these beasts is quite the epic task: each poster takes about half an hour to run through the printer!
Just because.
After almost two years of single-handed research, design, checking and cross-checking, I'm incredibly proud and thrilled to present my latest map project. It shows every single current and signed Interstate Highway and U.S. Highway in the contiguous 48 states in a style very similar to my previous Interstates as Subway Map and U.S. Highways as a Subway Map projects. Having made two separate maps that showed each type of road, I really had to at least try to combine them both into one map, didn't I?
