I teased this in yesterday’s review of the new official UTA diagram, so here’s my exploration of a few design ideas for an alternative version. As always with this type of project, I look for ways to approach the design problems for the diagram that are intentionally different to the official one. We already know what those solutions look like, so I like to explore the untested and see what happens. Some things work really well, others perhaps not so much… so let’s take a look!

My design rules for this project were pretty simple: use the same canvas size (18″ x 29″, presumably the size of signage frames at UTA stations), the same line colours, the same font family (Whitney Condensed) and show all of the information that’s present on the official diagram.

As hinted at in yesterday’s post, my first action was to make the FrontRunner line dead straight from Ogden down to Orem, becoming the strong vertical axis that the rest of the rest of the diagram is then composed around. This means that the light rail lines have to slide across to meet it, but I feel that the major interchange at Central Pointe station at least gives them a visual reason to do so. There’s no right or wrong answer here: in reality, all the rail lines parallel each other very closely through Salt Lake City – it’s only the diagram’s need to enlarge the free fare zone that artificially creates a gap between them that then needs to be closed before they actually interchange at Murray Central. The official diagram makes the FrontRunner line move over; I went with the other approach.

Speaking of Murray Central, I got rid of that god-awful little kink in the FrontRunner line there by simply retaining a small gap between it and the light rail lines and using a simple connecting line between them. In real life, passengers have to walk across a car park to get between the two parts of the station, so this seems to be both an easy and realistic solution. As this small gap between the lines now indicates some sort of physical proximity, I made the decision to flip the Blue Line out so that the South Jordan and Sandy Civic Center stations have some distance between them. The official diagram places them adjacent when it’s a 2-mile walk from one to the other… which is not the same as crossing a car park!

However, the biggest difference between my version and the official one is my treatment of the BRT lines. Instead of trying to use the same visual “scale” as the rest of the diagram and massively enlarging the area needed to show these routes in their entirety, I’ve instead used smaller, simplified representations of the lines on the main diagram and linked them to insets of strip maps showing all the stop names. It’s worth noting that these insets could also be enlarged diagrams or geographical maps of the routes, but I really didn’t feel like drawing them for this quick exercise (just being honest here!). The plus side of this is that the main diagram can be more “to scale” without the massive distortions that having to include the full BRT routes creates, although I’d still say that even these simple representations are still twice the size they should be if they were truly in-keeping with the relative scale of the outer portions of the map. The down side? Increased cognitive load for the end user as they have to relate the small map to the map or strip map in the inset. Simplicity is definitely a benefit of the official UTA approach, scale be damned!

Other points to note: all labels are set horizontally, even though my type point size is slightly larger and the area that the central portion of the diagram takes up is marginally smaller than on the official diagram. Seriously, it was so simple to do this that there’s really no excuse for the official version not to do it in the future.

I’ve bumped up the weight of all the labels – Book to Medium, and Regular to Bold – which I think makes a tremendous difference to the how solid and grounded the diagram feels. Lightweight, spindly type is not my aesthetic; I like things to be bolder and for my chosen weights to have some good visual contrast between them. I’ve also only used the Whitney Condensed family throughout instead of mixing thicknesses, which I feel helps to unify the look of the diagram.

The free fare zone is highlighted in yellow to draw the eye and also differentiate it from the three grey boxes around the edge of the map. The zone is also identified as such right on the map itself, obviating the need for readers to refer to a legend. Note also how all the labels for stations included in the zone are contained totally within the yellow area – removing any ambiguity about which stations are eligible for that sweet free trip.

All stations that interchange between light rail and FrontRunner now have bold labels, and the two station names for the North Temple/North Temple Bridge interchange have been consolidated into one because, quite frankly, that’s just ridiculous and made the labelling there so much more complex than it needed to be. I don’t mind which name gets used, but just pick one!

A stylistic choice – all the lines terminate either horizontally or vertically, never on a diagonal. It helps unify the design and allows the station name and line designation marker to always be close to the actual station marker, presenting information consistently throughout. The official diagram puts the labels and markers on one line with the marker furtherest away from the station dot – which means that sometimes the markers are a long, long way away from the place they’re meant to be providing information about!

And finally, a bit of whimsy: the locations where the light rail lines cross the FrontRunner lines are vertically accurate (i.e., the diagram properly shows which one goes under or over the other), and there’s a little “shadow” on the lower line to give an illusion of depth. Necessary? No. Fun to do? Absolutely.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! What works? What doesn’t? I’m pretty pleased with how this looks considering I didn’t spend a massive amount of time working on it, but I know it’s not a complete solution – just some ideas rattling around my head that show interesting alternative approaches to the ever-improving real thing.