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If you’ve come here after checking out the latest Field Notes limited Quarterly Edition, “Mile Marker”, you might be wondering who I am. The “Mile Marker” map is based in part on my own “Highways of the USA” map, which depicts every existing and signed Interstate Highway and U. S. Numbered Highway in the contiguous United States. The highway shield icons were also redrawn and the typography brought in line with the Field Notes house style (Futura forever!). Check out some of my other projects here on this site, or head over to my own on-line print store, where I sell a variety of original and digitally restored vintage transit-related maps.

Earlier this year, I was commissioned to create a series of trade route maps for Wallenius Wilhelmsen Ocean, a leading global provider of deep-sea ocean transportation for cars, trucks, rolling equipment and breakbulk cargo. The client had already developed some rough “subway map” visualizations for their network, noting that their current geographical maps of longer routes compressed many ports into very small areas while leaving vast swathes of empty ocean taking up the majority of space. It was my task to take this rough mockup and develop a design language that could be scaled from a single short trade route all the way up to a global network map, all while remaining simple and legible enough to work within the confines of a PowerPoint slide. Likewise, transshipment routes – incoming routes to the major “hub” ports, often via third parties – were originally shown in detail as secondary “feeder lines”, but this gradually morphed into the simpler approach of the final map.

So I looked back to the original 1967 MBTA spider maps, which used black dots for stations with thin connector lines between lines at North Station and Haymarket; while the individual line map used coloured squares to indicate connections to other lines (see image to left). Using black dots meant that I had to brighten up the line colours considerably from the old version, which used richer “heritage” hues, like crimson for the Red Line in honour of Harvard instead of a normal red. The pink guide lines show intentional relationships between elements on the map: note in particular how  the baselines of station labels line up all across the map to create invisible horizontal gridlines. The Silver Line was simplified a lot from the old map: running three lines in parallel for the SL1, SL2 and SL3 out of South Station was going to be too unwieldy, so one line was to represent all trunk services.

Readers of my Transit Maps blog will know that I recently featured some awesome concept artwork by Massimo Vignelli for the Washington DC Metro map that was created as part of an unsuccessful bid for the map’s contract in the early 1970s. The initial system was easy enough with just two lines and easy-to-read labels, but the full system concept was reproduced at too small a size to be able to read any station labels. Two alternate Green Line terminus stations, a standalone station on the purple commuter rail line out to Herndon and an interchange station between the commuter rail line and the Green Line. I couldn’t find a name for the station immediately to the left of the Anacostia interchange on the Yellow Line, so I gave it the modern name of Congress Heights, as the other obvious choice of Alabama Avenue was already in use.