Over the years, I’ve written frequently about various subway map designs. We’ve looked at heart-shaped gimmicks, Massimo Vignelli’s controversial design and the Kickmap, to name a few. All of them have their pluses and minuses, and many are better than the current version suffering from information overload.
Recently, Treehugger took a look at the world’s best alternative subway maps. Included in the slideshow are many of the maps I’ve explored before as well as some gems from around the globe. I particularly enjoy Harry Beck’s failed attempt to reproduce the Paris Metro in the style of his famous London Underground map. The multi-modal map and the Triptrop map are two New York City entries worth a closer look.
4 comments
I love the Kick Map.
I like the Kick map too, although there are some things I would probably change… I’d probably lose the different colors for the neighborhoods, for example. But overall it’s a vast improvement over the current mess. I’ve been “studying” this issue for a long time now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that our subway is very likely impossible to map with the clarity or elegance you see in maps of other large systems like London or Paris–because ours is just more complicated. There are just too many overlapping routes, expresses, locals, routes that merge and diverge… The only way to get a really good map would be for the MTA to simplify its routes–somehow. Anyway, I truly pity tourists who have to deal with The Map. I see them wandering around, desperately clutching the thing in hopes that somehow it will all become clear if they study it just a little longer….
The Kickmap is a superior product – many good reasons have already been thrown out there, but here’s another: Unless you’re in a station looking at a big map poster, “The Map” is reviewed while unfolded and held in a slightly cumbersome way upright in the reader’s hands, or reviewed on a moving and shaking train, but does not list all station names purely horizontally – the way people read most naturally and comfortably.
The Kickmap is so much easier to read.
I often help those tourists who are struggling to figure out what to do with the MTA map by showing them the Kickmap I have on my iPhone.