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| Re: TfL finally updates London Connections map... (371306) | |||
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Re: TfL finally updates London Connections map... |
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Posted by Rail Blue on Wed Jan 17 09:01:34 2007, in response to Re: TfL finally updates London Connections map..., posted by Max Roberts on Wed Jan 17 05:33:41 2007. 1) Circle Line in-joke: most passengers don't care about which line goes over which other, but they do care about being able to identify line trajectories. The trajectory of a double line (or even a triple one) is more easily identified and more able to obliterate the trajectory of a single line, therefore the single line should go on top: Psychology 101; better that an experienced user gets jarred than an inexperienced one gets lost. The experienced users will learn the new system, but there is always an unlimited supply of inexperienced ones waiting to gum up the works.Fair enough. That triple line is actually really horrid... maybe we should go back to everything in green... 2) Kink in central line: I don't like it either, but the Central Line needs one somewhere, and I would prefer to keep it out from inside the Circle Line. Making the map taller could permit its elimination, but would end up with Ealing broadway where Hounslow currently is. Or the entire map could be rotated (yes, I know, a total pain, but a horizontal Central Line would make the map look a lot less weird (Chiswick Park to St James's Park isn't exactly the most obvious choice for the horizontal!)). Actually, it might be interesting to have a straight line from St James's Park to Ealing Broadway and have both branches of the Picc kink off... 3) Heathrow: Why? How is the user going to be misinformed by this in any way. Well, it's the least bad pair of stations to do that to for the reason you mention. I would like to see you do a funny-angle London Connections map though... The 45-degree angle rule worked OK for Beck for London (but he couldn't get it to work for Paris). IINM, he got Paris horribly horribly wrong. It would probably work with a vertical Line 4 and a horizontal Line 1. and only a skilled designer can carry it off (most designers can't get a 45-degree map right). Shame TfL don't seem to have anyone like that... You should have seen my out-takes for this map, some of them are really frightening to look at. Go on. You know you want to... A bloopers section would be a great addition to afterbeck.com! I know of no psychological or design theory that states that a single-angle map is easiest to understand, or the best for representing a transport network. Its just design dogma, like the 'golden rectangle'. Indeed, for Paris, I think that applying the rule is wrong. Damn you, Max. You're making me open up Inkscape and waste my afternoon... Here, the Metro lines often roll over each other and back again. In order to keep the relative positions of stations 'correct', and with only one angle and tight curves available, this has resulted in a horrible zig-zagging map with lines kinked all over the place. Each kink is an additional piece of information to interpret and acts as a barrier to interpreting the underlying structure of the network (the nodes and the links). London would be worse if we had more lines in sensible places - it's why the London Connections map's two versions represent two levels of horror and why my fantasy map is taking absolutely forever and I already hate the design! With my map, the problem is that you are so used to the 45-degree angle rule, that when you look at a map that breaks the rule, it looks 'wrong', and you dismiss it. You need to teach yourself how to look at maps afresh. What I say to people, is look at this map (properly) for five minutes every day for a fortnight, and suddenly it will click, and 'make sense'. Its worked for everyone so far, including the MD for FWT Cartography. It's a nice concept, and it basically works. I actually quite like it. |
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