Now this is a map! This is just superb cartography: detailed, clear and lovely to look at. I love the way that brown is used for mountainous features, and a light blue is used for water features – it allows this information to be visible, but it doesn’t compete with the overlaid railroad lines. The map is packed with other information as well – note the three rail gauges in use in Argentina at the […]
Submitted by Douglas, who says: I’m sure you would find it interesting, as you have attempted to do the inverse of what Sean is doing. Transit Maps says: This map is indeed the exact inverse of my project from 2019 to show the New York Subway in the style of the London Underground diagram, and arguably more successful as it actually works as intended (mine looks great, but is ultimately flawed as it cannot show […]
It's safe to say that I'm fascinated with the rich transit history of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, and it's certainly something that I've explored before. This new project started out with a very simple goal – to produce a route map of Portland streetcars at their zenith in 1920 that showed each line separately – but it quickly grew into something much more.
Based on feedback from the first draft of this new version of my Amtrak as subway map, I’ve gone and made a few edits, additions and corrections. The major revision is a reworking of the main section of the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington to make things a little clearer. I’m still using overlapping “multiplied route colour” lines to indicate identical service patterns, but I’ve broken the routes down into smaller, thematically linked groups: the three […]
At the end of April 2015, Amtrak's Hoosier State service between Chicago and Indianapolis is scheduled to be discontinued — the first complete loss of a service since I created my "Amtrak as Subway Map" way back in 2010. Over the years, I've been pretty vigilant to changes to the Amtrak network — adding and deleting stations as required, extending the Downeaster Line to Brunswick and the Northeast Regional to Norfolk — but a change of this magnitude gives me the chance to take a completely fresh look at this project and rework everything from scratch, instead of just tweaking the old diagram again. Let's face it – I've learned a lot of new skills and tricks in the intervening years!
If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then H.C. Beck must have been blushing when this diagram of railway services in Sydney, Australia was produced in 1939. Designed just six years after Beck's famous London Underground diagram first appeared, it mimics the original's style almost perfectly. As scans of this map on the Internet had quality issues, I decided to redraw it in Adobe Illustrator from scratch.
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!
I came across this great 1926 map of the original Numbered U.S. Highway System via an article on CityLab. As I looked, I began to see that while the quality of the scan was good, and the content of the map was fascinating, the map itself was in a pretty sorry state -- so I decided to digitally restore it.
Here's a small project that was inspired by a message to my Transit Maps blog about the currently existing map for the McKinney Avenue heritage trolley line in Dallas, Texas. However, rather than review and criticise a map produced for a non-profit organisation (most likely by a volunteer or staff in their spare time), I thought that I would create a new, accurate, more user-friendly map instead.
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?
