Designed to showcase two new typeface families from the FontFont foundry, this “Metro map” looks quite spectacular at first glance, with some lovely colour combinations and design details. It’s only on closer inspection that you realise that it’s actually a superb piece of nonsense – nothing really makes any sense at all.

Most type – apart from the few major “stations” – is way too small to be useful, and the circled line designations are scattered randomly around, instead of being located at the end of routes. There’s also a faint grid at a very slight angle, which lines up with neither the orthogonal grid of the routes or the north pointer at the bottom left. And what do the thin white lines across the route lines mean? Even the station names themselves are a bit of a hodge-podge: many are named after Paris Métro stations, but there’s also a few famous people thrown in, and even a few basic French words here and there.

And yes, I realise how silly it is to nitpick an imaginary transit map created to showcase some shiny new typefaces, but – hey, that’s what I do.

Source: FontFont/Flickr – link no longer active