Submitted by Sergio, who says:

So I always wanted to design a diagram for Tokyo, but since it’s so complex I’d postponed it several times until one week that I had nothing to do I started tackling it from scratch, using pen and paper before moving to Affinity Designer. I chose to design a map that includes both Tokyo Metro and Toei Metro, as well as one of the main train lines and the Shinkansen services that arrive to the city. In the end I even put the Chuo Sobu Line from a recommendation a Japanese person made to my design.

Transit Maps says:

Like the London Underground and the New York Subway, making an unofficial map or diagram of Tokyo’s rail network is almost an obligatory rite of a passage for budding designers (perhaps even more so than the other two, because there’s no one “definitive version” of Tokyo’s map). Sergio’s is a particularly handsome effort, though perhaps with a few usability/design issues.

First off, I really like the way that Sergio has used the Toei Oedo Line as his main compositional element, forming a lovely distinctive symmetrical shape in the middle of the diagram that everything else relates to in much the same way that the London Underground diagram uses the Circle Line, which even forms a similar “thermos flask” shape. Most other Tokyo maps I see use the Yamanote Line for this purpose (which make sense as it encircles the city) but this can often make the central part of the map seem too cramped. It does mean that the Yamanote Line on Sergio’s map takes a slightly wobbly path (I’m not entirely convinced by the detour it takes around Shibuya), but I think it’s a decent trade-off. The spacing of stations throughout the map is even and harmonious, and the whole thing, title and legend included, feels like a well-designed, unified whole. On a complex diagram like this, labels cutting across route lines are hard to avoid, but I think Sergio has done a good job of making such labels look clean and deiberate.

I do think that the station codes are too small to be read easily, especially when they’re set in lighter colours (tiny yellow numbers on a white background!). These codes are a primary part of station identification in Tokyo, so reducing their importance so much on a map seems counter-productive. This problem also rolls over into line identification, because these tiny codes are currently the only link between the lines as named in the legend and the map itself. As always, this is especially problematic for colour-blind users.

Indicating that some of the lines offer through-running services to the Greater Tokyo area is a good idea in theory, but where do the lines actually go? An unlabelled dashed line doesn’t really tell anyone very much. As a comparison, the named Shinkansen destinations make those lines much more useful.

Our final word: A well-balanced and attractive diagram of a complex network, though the tiny station codes seem like they’ve been sacrificed for the sake of that aesthetic.