The Almost Official Map: Ilya Birman’s Moscow Metro Map
I’ve seen a lot of tweets recently linking to the design process page for Art Lebedev’s new official Moscow Metro map (Transit Maps wrote about this page way back on February 4th).
However, I haven’t seen as much attention being paid to the second-place winning map, designed by Ilya Birman. He also has a design process page for his map, and it’s just as fascinating as the Lebedev one.
He discusses the difficulty of having to label the map in Cyrillic and Latin scripts, as well as the problems posed by stations having multiple names, depending which line they are on.
The map also employs an unusual station-finding technique that relates all stations to the Circle Line, rather than the more usual grid look-up. It seems a little quirky at first, but it’s actually surprisingly intuitive after a while.
The page also addresses important issues like colour-blindness (the map holds up fairly well) and what to do when a station named Aeroport no longer has an airport anywhere near it.
Well worth a look, if only to see the sheer amount of thought and effort that goes into making a transit map of this quality. For me, there’s very little between this map and the Lebedev map, and both would have been very worthy of being the public face of this venerable Metro system.
20th February 2013
Notes: 20
The Design Process Behind the New Moscow Metro Map
As you may have heard by now, the Art Lebedev Studio entry will become the new official Moscow Metro map at the end of February. It beat out the other two entries convincingly, garnering 52% of the popular vote.
Of particular interest to me, though, is the design process page for the map on their website: a fascinating look at the hard work and effort that goes into making a world-class transit map. Concepts are tried, refined, discarded and tried again to find the perfect solution. Nothing is taken for granted and everything is evaluated again and again. Note the beautiful underlying grid (shown above) and the guides used for accurately placing station labels perfectly every time (something that the Washington DC Metro map was completely incapable of in its redesign last year.) More than anything, this page shows that good design doesn’t just “happen”: it’s a process that evolves over time according to the needs of the client and the designer’s skills.
The best part of the page? The map halfway down the page where you can scrub through 95 — yes, ninety-five! — different iterations of the map to see how the map evolved over time.
See also this page on Lebedev’s website that details all the features of the final, finished map. Also fascinating!
Potential Official Maps? Finalists for the new Moscow Metro Map
Further to my post regarding the unofficial “guerrilla” Moscow Metro map, Twitter correspondent @dars_dm has given me links to the maps produced by the three finalists in the official competition for a new Metro Map. I’ve reproduced them here for your edification. In order, they’re produced by Artemy Lebedev, Ilya Birman and Anton Mizinov and are all very strong in their own way.
I’ll confess that I’ve had a huge soft spot for the Lebedev map ever since I first came across it in 2010 and wrote this blog entry about it on my design blog — in what’s basically an embryonic Transit Maps post — wrongly identifying it as a new official map. In particular, I think his circular interchange symbols at major transfer stations are gorgeous, perfectly echoing the main Circle Line, which is such a distinctive feature of the Moscow Metro.
However, I’m interested in your thoughts (via comments, reblogs or answering this entry)… which of these three maps would you pick as your winner?
My previous post about the “map bombing” of the Moscow Metro has had a lot of interest, so I thought I’d pass on the fact that the original partizaning.org article about it has been translated properly into English on their site. Well worth a read.
And as a bonus, you can download your own PDF of the map, or the Illustrator .ai file and fonts required to edit it yourself.
Unofficial Map: Partizaning.org “Guerrilla” Moscow Metro Map
Last year, the Moscow Metro introduced a completely new official map, which featured 30-degree angles. Put simply, it went down like a lead balloon (link in Russian), forcing the authorities to hastily organise a competition for another brand new design.
However, some people decided they didn’t want to enter what’s essentially a no-spec design “contest” (there’s no payment for the winner, just thanks for a job well done) and set about designing their own map independently… and then covertly placing them on Metro carriages.
Reading the imperfect Google translation of their project website reveals their design goals: to bring the map back to a geographical grounding - showing the distance between stations better and how they relate to the physical landmarks of the city, especially the river. Connections to commuter rail are also shown, to better visualise usage of all transit in the greater Moscow area. All lines under construction have been excised from this map to bring greater clarity to the services currently offered.
Despite my own preference for diagrammatic system maps, I actually quite like this map. There’s some lovely work here, and the transparency effect applied to the route lines is quite beautiful. As seen by the last picture, it looks great in a real-world setting, and I’ve heard that the designers have enlarged the type size for better legibility since this first foray into the real world.
Our Rating: As much a political statement as it is a map, but undoubtedly good. Three-and-a-half-stars.
(Source: Partizaning.org via @dars_dm)
Unofficial Map/Art: Moscow “Underround”
Definitely more a piece of art using the Moscow Metro as inspiration than an actual usable map, but still noteworthy. Taking the spoke and hub nature of the Metro completely literally, the work shows the stations along each line in the form of concentric rings: simple, but graphically effective. I have no doubt that a seasoned Muscovite Metro commuter would be able to locate the stations they use quite easily.
(Source: aircoooled karma/Flickr
Historical Map: Moscow Metro, 1980
Here’s a beautiful map of the Moscow Metro from 1980 that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it’s an official map, as it looks quite different to other Moscow maps of the same vintage. The archive I found the map in also lists it as “Source Unknown”. It appears to have been printed on the flyleaf of a pocket-sized book, bound to the book’s front cover on the left half, with the fold just to the right of the vertical Orange Line of the map.
Have we been there? No.
What we like: One of the most unique-looking transit maps I’ve ever seen. It looks more like a map of the solar system, with Jupiter-sized interchange stations within the orbit of the Ring Line, smaller satellites (outlying stations) trailing along in their wake. Despite the unusual form, and the renowned complexity of the Moscow system, this still has a nice sense of clarity, simplicity and order to it - this map is still very usable.
What we don’t like: Some absolutely terrible registration on the printing (which appears to be all spot colours - nine different colours in total!). Some fairly crude-looking linework, which may be poor draftsmanship or the result of the printing.
Our rating: Totally unique, but still a very usable map. Four stars.
(Source: Lebedev Studio’s historical archives of Moscow Metro maps)
Click here for another abstract Moscow Metro map.
MetroTable: the Moscow Metro as an Awesome Coffee Table
Do want.
(Source: Vladimir Tomilov’s Behance Portfolio via @Piktograf)
