Submitted by Niklas, who says: Hi! I’m a student currently living in Berlin. I’ve always been fascinated by maps and recently I started to design one of my own. I hope you would review it on the blog, and give me some pointers as to where it can improve. I wanted to redesign Berlin’s Transit Map in a different style (or rather my own). The map shows all U-Bahn (Metro), S-Bahn (Urban Rail) and Regional […]
A lesson in how not to add station labels to a strip map: type at five different angles makes things incredibly hard to read. Also not to be recommended for legibility is the all-caps treatment of station names. This would work much better if the route line was pushed to the top of the strip, with all stations spaced equally and type set at one consistent angle across the entire diagram. Source: A2DAC1985/Flickr
While it’s true that I don’t really like the use of station labels that are angled – being very much in the Erik Spiekermann camp that believes horizontal labels aid comprehension and create a cleaner looking map – I do realise that there are times when their use is necessary. If you do use angled labels, then I strongly advise that you keep the number of angles used to the absolute minimum required – type […]
Following on from last week’s tutorial, here’s how to use the Core Type Area to make your station labels align perfectly and consistently when you’re applying them to 45-degree angled route lines. If you use the edges of the Core Type Area when you’re aligning labels to horizontal and vertical route lines, then it should make perfect sense that you use the corners of it when you’re labelling angled stations. The first GIF shows the […]
A lot of transit maps that I’ve seen and reviewed on this blog are badly let down by their labelling. Sometimes it seems that the labels have been applied without much forethought or planning, or just slapped on at the end and placed wherever they will fit. But labels are arguably one of the most important parts of a transit map: it should always be immediately apparent which station marker a label belongs to, and […]
Here’s a small but important tip when it comes to working with station labels in Adobe Illustrator. Most of the time, it’s easier to use what Illustrator calls point type when setting labels – that is, you click once with the Type Tool and then type your text, rather than dragging out a text frame with the tool. It looks neater in wireframe view and is generally less cumbersome to work with. However, you need […]
