All posts tagged: subway

Unofficial Map: Non-Entry for the MBTA “New Perspectives” Map Challenge by Dave Ortega

April 30, 2013
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daveortega: I love the idea of re-designing Boston’s clunky quasi-decipherable Rapid Transit Map. When I heard that the T was putting together a challenge to re-design the map I seized the opportunity. My enthusiasm cooled once I read the fine-print, but more on that later. I spent the weekend tweaking Bezier curves and aligning dots (so many damn dots), using references like Google maps and subway maps from around the world and came up with […]

Photo – Naked TTC Rocket Map

April 29, 2013
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What goes on underneath the printed map. The lights for the future Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension stations are already in place in the upper left of the map. Fortunately, the map hasn’t been stolen by someone to reveal these inner workings: it’s simply been moved to the left. This being Toronto, however, it’s probably only a matter of minutes until someone makes off with it to hang on their bedroom/dorm wall. EDIT: As ytomatoboi points out, […]

Historical Map: Old M1 Signage, Bucharest Metro, Romania, c. 1989

April 24, 2013
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The Gara de Nord to Dristor 2 section of the M1 line opened in 1989, and this signage certainly looks like it’s from that era. The design is pretty rough and ready, looking almost like the sign makers made it up as they went along, but it does have a certain brutalist charm about it.  Of particular interest are the two patches at each end of the map that keep this old map somewhat up […]

Historical Map: “Opening Day” Washington, DC Metro Map, 1976

April 16, 2013
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Directly related to yesterday’s post, here’s an even older map of the Washington, DC Metro – this one is from an informational pamphlet released for the March 29, 1976 opening of the first part of the system, and is clearly dated at he bottom right. Inexplicably, the Red Line is a dark burgundy colour, while the Orange Line is shown as red, even though they’re both clearly labelled correctly in the legend. How a printing […]

Historical Map: Washington, DC Metro Map, 1977

April 15, 2013
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As you may know, I’ve had a lot to say about recent iterations of the Washington, DC Metro Map (Rush+ map review, draft Silver Line map review), but how about a look at where it all began? This is a Metro map from March, 1977 – about a year after the system first started carrying passengers. At first glance, it looks very similar to today’s modern map… but then you realise that the only section […]

Historical Map: Plans for New York Subway Expansion, 1920

April 5, 2013
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I found out about this awesome map from a tweet from Vanshnookenraggen (otherwise known as Andrew Lynch) just the other day. Originally, I was just going to post the black and white map from the 1920 New York Times article that the original blog post references, but then I realised that the image on the blog linked to a super high resolution PDF of the map. As I found the map in the newspaper article […]

Book Review: “Vignelli Transit Maps”, Peter B. Lloyd with Mark Ovenden

April 1, 2013
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As a graphic designer with a keen interest in transit maps and a fairly thorough knowledge of their history and usage, I thought I had a decent understanding of Massimo Vignelli’s diagrammatic version of the New York Subway map, which was used from 1972 to 1979. This outstanding book has proved me almost completely and utterly wrong. So much of what we think we know about the Vignelli map is simply hearsay and legend, repeated […]

Official Map: Interactive Metro Map, Pyongyang, North Korea

March 21, 2013
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An interactive metro map from North Korea’s secretive capital. The green buttons across the bottom of the map represent all the stations: press one and the path from your current station to your destination lights up. With just a handful of stations on two lines (and only one interchange), I hardly think many people are going to be overwhelmed by the system’s complexity. Wikipedia’s article on the Pyongyang Metro is actually a very interesting read: the […]

Photo: NY Subway Map and Tokens, 1990

March 15, 2013
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Great little slice of history here. The photographer on Flickr seems to recall the cost of a token as being 60 cents at the time; Wikipedia prices it at $1.15. As a graphic designer, all I can see is the terrible registration in the (cheap) printing – look at the huge yellow halo bleeding out to the right of the green and red printed areas. (In four-colour printing, green is made from combining cyan and […]