I make things on the internet
OSS440, the UK’s worst selling map
A single Scots pine grows from a boulder standing in the middle of Achness waterfall in Glen Cassley in the Highlands. It is a striking sight. Isolated in the fiercely flowing river Cassley, the tree towers above a long stretch of rocks swept by torrents of water. Salmon leap upriver in summer while golden eagles swoop overhead.
Montreal metro map poster. These are the ones that displayed in the metro cars, they’re quite large. I picked one up last weekend at a local street fair — now I need to figure out how to hang it on the wall.
A version of the NYC subway map, which had been lost to history, was recently found and recreated digitally by Reka Komoli.
A local lawyer, R. Raleigh D’Adamo, was the winner of that 1964 contest. His design separated local from express routes and assigned separate colors to each of them. Submissions had to fit all the subway lines into a geographically correct map. So to use as little space as possible, D’Adamo employed colored squares along shared lines.
Personally, I would’ve found the map tough to use as a tourist, none of the station names are indicated. It was replaced by Massimo Vignelli’s version three years later.
The Submarine Cable Map, just in case you wanted to know where your bits are going. Here’s an excerpt from the description of the site:
TeleGeography’s free interactive submarine cable map is based on our authoritative Global Bandwidth research, and depicts active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable route on the map provides access to data about the cable, including the cable’s name, ready-for-service (RFS) date, length, owners, website, and landing points. Selecting a landing point provides a list of all submarine cables landing at that station.
The source is available too.
Animals on the Underground, a collection of line-art animals discovered within the London tube map.
The animals, created using the tube lines, stations and junctions of the London Underground map were first spotted by Paul Middlewick in 1988. The original animal, the elephant was discovered while Paul was staring at the tube map during his daily journey home from work. Since then, the elephant has been joined by many others from bats to bottlenose whales.
There are more than thirty animals so far, maybe you can find another one?
Axis Maps has released a Typographic Maps art project, which accurately depicts the physical features of the cities using nothing but type. So far, they’ve only created maps of Boston and Chicago, but I imagine there will be more down the road. Their blog entry has a few additional details about the process, including the fact that they were created through manual tracing and adjustment, nothing automated.
Oskar Karlin reworked the infamous London Underground map using the time it takes to travel between stations rather than the distance.
A Typeface for the Underground takes an in-depth look at the history of the Johnston typeface used by Transport for London. You might also be interested in Ken Garland’s book, Mr Beck’s Underground map, detailing the history of a design icon.
The World Digital Library provides a significant number “primary materials” free of charge to the general public. This includes maps, manuscripts and other ephemera to promote intercultural understanding.
London: A Life in Maps. A great collection from the British Library, I had the chance to see them in person while I was there last year.