This is it. My final take on a redesigned Washington, D.C. Metro Map. This is my third major revision of a project that began in February of last year, and won the People’s Choice Award in the Greater Greater Washington “Redesign the Metro Map” contest earlier this year. I’ve taken time away from this diagram to work on a few other projects recently, but the release of Lance Wyman’s draft diagram has inspired me to finish an “ultimate” version of my vision of the diagram.
This version looks quite similar to the previous two, but has been reworked to take into account comments that I received after the GGW contest, and also incorporates some successful elements from other entries in that contest, such as subtitles for lengthy station names. (Best. Idea. Ever.)
Some of the bigger changes include a thickening of the route lines, “tick” markers for stations that point towards the station’s label (to combat some criticism that it was sometimes difficult to determine which label belonged to which station in my previous versions) and a general tightening of the layout to be more compact. Type size is also increased throughout. I’ve also dropped the separate full route lines for the new peak-only services that I used in the contest: general consensus seemed to indicate this was more confusing than helpful. The peak extensions to the Yellow and Orange lines are now shown as spurs of the main line, as on Lance Wyman’s new draft diagram. I’ve also come up with a much better device for showing the out-of-system transfer between Farragut West and Farragut North than my contest version.
Working on this diagram has been great fun, and I’m incredibly proud of the reaction and attention it has got. My reasoning has always been that there is more than one way to solve a design problem, and if I’ve been able to make people think about why they like the current one, or if they find they like this one better, then that’s just a bonus!
View the diagram on Flickr for access to a 4000px version. As always, comments are welcome!
