Submitted by Arsen, who says:

Hello, this summer I with Sergey Steblina as art-director designed a transit map of Gdańsk trams. I am very interested what Transit Maps think about this.

Transit Maps says:

Overall, this is very solid and clean work – very much in the style of diagram popularised by Ilya Birman, with straight segments connected by wide, sweeping curves. For the most part, this looks rather lovely, though the tight obtuse angle that Line 12 takes to head down to the bottom left looks a little unconvincing, as does the squiggly routing that Line 10 takes around the Nowy Port loop at the top right. The routing of Line 5 around this loop looks like it might have an error as well: if it enters the loop going from Kasztanowa to Na Zaspę and then travels counter-clockwise around the loop, it would exit at Rybołowców back to Kasztanowa – meaning that there’s no need to show Line 5 running directly between Rybołowców and Na Zaspę, a segment that’s only served by Line 7.

The colour palette of the map is nice and bright, and the parks, water and city centre are nicely indicated, but I do feel that the very light green chosen for Line 2 is just too light when compared to the other lines. It almost disappears completely when running alongside the dark purple Line 11, for example. The bright yellow of Line 6 poses some more contrast problems when its station tick is adjacent to the map’s white background at the top left of the map.

Speaking of the station ticks: I love the modern design of them with a slight inwards tapering, but it does create something of an optical illusion where the last tick at a station – the one leading to the station label – looks a tiny bit smaller than the others. This is one of these things that probably just needs to be tweaked a bit by perhaps making that last tick just a tiny bit wider so that it looks visually right rather than being mathematically correct.

Finally, a quick Wikipedia search seems to indicate that Lines 4 and 7 only run on weekdays, and Line 11 only runs during weekday peak hours – all of which would be useful information to include in the diagram’s legend.

Our final word: Clean and modern, though I’ve seen a few maps previously with a very similar design style. Some of the curves could be cleaned up a bit, and a couple of colour choices could perhaps be revisited. Otherwise, this is great work.