Submitted by James, who says:

While I’ve been designing imaginary transit maps, and re-imagining existing transit maps, for a few years, I’ve been doing it on Illustrator. I’ve drawn the Welsh rail franchise a number of times, but I set myself a few challenges this time round.

1. I wanted to make it clearly bilingual. Here in Wales we’re used to seeking out our respective languages on signs and official documents, but official versions of the map often use a coloured, and slightly lighter shade for the Welsh variants. There is some merit in this when you are trying to squeeze everything into a cramped layout, but if you space your information correctly I see no reason why this should be necessary.
2. Unlike my previous versions, I wanted to be able to give a clear indication of the normal routes that trains take. There are clear flows. In the Cardiff area, trains from Merthyr go to Barry, trains from Rhymney go to Penarth. At Wrexham General the hourly service to Holyhead comes from Birmingham and Cardiff on alternate hours, and so on. Adding in lines has forced each individual stroke to go smaller. I have used a ‘white blob’ indicator for station stops.
3. I wanted the map to be clearly legible when printed as small as A3. For the vast majority of type I employed the DIN Condensed typeface. It renders clearly but gives enough room for the bilingual text. The only place where I failed to keep this at 8pt type was at Energlyn, a new station on the Rhymney line which already has a great many stops. I’ve tried to handle it elegantly, though I doubt everyone will be convinced!
4. Finally, and to explain my first paragraph, I wanted to use this map to try out Affinity Designer. I’ve been fairly impressed: this could emerge as a serious contender to Illustrator in time. It has most of the basic tools already, and although the interface can be clunky at times and some tools definitely need work, it has very capably produced a result which could definitely rival the official maps.

Nonetheless this work could do with some further refinement. I’m not quite convinced by the joined white dots at major interchanges like Cardiff, the placement of which I have played around with many times. DIN Alternate is also not the most beautiful typeface for the large fonts, though it does resonate clearly with DIN Condensed.

I’d be grateful for an overall critique, and any positive suggestions regarding improvements. 

NB. The original output is obviously a PDF with a nominal page size of A3, but I have rendered it as a PNG for uploading. I’ve also been doing this on a Retina iMac, and it’s a pleasure to look at text and line art!

Transit Maps says:

Overall, this is a very attractive and well-conceived diagrammatic map. It is a little bit of a shame that the landscape A3 format squashes Wales vertically so much, but the neat organization of the map – with well-defined operating regions and strong visual axes – counteracts that somewhat. I especially like how the Valleys and Cardiff commuter rail lines at the bottom of the map are arrayed in a neat shape surrounding Cardiff, which are then further delineated by the “loop” line from Swansea back to Shrewsbury. The vertical compression does lead to some stations on north/south routes being placed very close to each other, which leads to some uneven-looking station spacing across the map, but everything is still nice and easy to follow. 

Like James himself, I’m not entirely enamoured of the diagonal placement of the station dots at some of the major interchanges like Cardiff. It doesn’t occur often enough in the map to be a repeating design motif, so it looks a little out of place when it does show up.

The bilingual labels on a completely even footing work quite nicely across the whole map, even when James has to deal with the ridiculous Victorian folly of a name at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch station on Anglesey (a made up name to impress tourists – I’ve been there and I wasn’t that impressed). I think his smaller type at Energlyn is a fair compromise given the space restrictions there, and is actually quite reminiscent of the “subtitle” approach to long station names that’s now used on the Washington Metro.

Apart from these comments, I’d probably also change the end of the red route line at the bottom right of the map into an arrow pointing towards London Paddington, rather than have it appear as a station apparently minutes across the Welsh border.

Our rating: A competently drawn and nicely abstracted diagrammatic map. Perhaps a little too squished from north to south as a result of paper size restrictions. Three stars.

Side note: James’ use of Affinity Designer – a newcomer to the Mac OS X vector illustration game – is definitely worthy of note. As seen from this map, it can produce excellent results, and the interface certainly seems to be more polished than the open-source Inkscape. With a price tag of just $50 for a license (not a subscription), it could be an ideal starting point for those Mac users wanting to get into transit map design, but who can’t afford Adobe Illustrator. For comparison, $50 buys you around 2.5 months of an Illustrator-only Creative Cloud subscription, or just one month of a complete CC subscription.