Wow! I've been completely blown away by the (mostly positive) response to my redrawn Tube Map. Thanks to everyone who has left me a comment or note – all of your thoughts help to inform future revisions to the map. There's a few more parts of the map that I'm personally really happy with that I'd like to highlight in a little more detail than the already lengthy initial post allowed. Read on for the details!
Here’s a simple little trick that works in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4 and above: You can quickly check your artwork to see how it might appear for a colour-blind user by simply going to the View menu > Proof Setup, then choosing one of the two colour-blind profiles at the bottom of the list. Then select View > Proof Colors (Cmd/Ctrl-Y in Photoshop). As you can see from the GIF above, the results can be […]
Yesterday, Adobe released updates to many of their Creative Cloud applications, including Illustrator (which is now at version 17.1, if you can believe it!).For me, the absolute standout feature is “Live Corners”, which is a game changer for the design and production of transit maps. Gone are the inconsistent and unpredictable results produced by the “Round Corners” effect, and my trusty but time-consuming workaround – using a set of master curves and manually cutting-and-pasting them into […]
A pretty simple trick this week, but one that I use all the time. If you need elements to be aligned precisely to another object, and always an exact distance away from that object, simply use a rectangle with no fill and no stroke (an “invisible” object) to define the required alignment and spacing. It won’t be visible in your final artwork, but can be seen in Illustrator’s Outline view for precise adjustment as required. […]
Imagine this scenario: you’ve been working for months on a complex transit map – lots of interchanges and routes – for a big-city transit agency and you’re presenting it to their management team for approval. They love it, except they’d like the circular interchange markers you’ve used to be square with rounded edges instead. And they’d like to see the revised version in an hour. If you’ve used standard Illustrator artwork for each of your […]
Last week’s tip about using the Offset Path command in Illustrator to create multiple parallel paths was very well received, but reader Leah left a comment saying that she finds using Art Brushes quicker and easier. If nothing else, it’s good to be reminded that there are always different ways to achieve the same result! Setting up an Art Brush for what we want to do is actually pretty simple. Simply create a short section […]
Here’s the last of my tutorials regarding station label placement – what to do when route lines intersect each other. There are three standard ways that orthogonal route lines can cross each other, each illustrated below. Horizontal and Vertical Lines: The simplest intersection to deal with. Simply keep the same distance from the side and top/bottom of your label for consistent results. Vertical Line Intersecting an Angled Line (or a Horizontal Line/Angled Line): This one’s […]
Let me preface this tutorial by saying that — without a shadow of a doubt — this is my number one most favourite, time-saving, map-making Adobe Illustrator trick ever. When making transit maps, it’s preferable — for both aesthetics and readability — to not have any labels overlay a route line or other elements. However, sometimes it’s simply unavoidable, as in the detail of my Boston MBTA map redesign at the top of the image above […]
This little tip is thanks to RG, who left a comment on the site asking: “Can you comment on how you make the 2pt of white space between lines show when you have lines cross over each other?” On most transit maps, route lines will cross over each other at various points. Most of the time, an interchange station exists at that point and the symbol for that covers up the lines as they cross. […]
It seems that the draft Sydney Trains map that I posted about the other day is the real thing: printed timetables featuring it have been seen and scanned. So, I started looking at it again in order to write a proper review, when I started to notice a lot of little technical things that – as a designer – I found jarring and inconsistent. I opened the PDF file in Adobe Illustrator and began to […]
