Time Travel Tube Map

London Underground Map by distances to travel

Oskar Karlin sent me a link to his blog where explains how he designed the beautiful looking "Time Travel Map" below:



He says: "Map in photo above is a part of one of my final projects I did for my last school, London College of Printing (now London College of Communication). It was an attemt to redesign the London Underground map. In the beginning when I didn't know what to do with the project, I called it "impossible mission". How could I come up with some innovative ideas to this piece of design that is by many considered as one of the best in graphic design ever?

"Well, I knew couldn't just do a normal re-design; something had to be added. I started thinking what's different in the world now from when the map was designed and one thing that are different today is time. No one has any time left any more. Time is money. Time is everything and so on. Today you never tell anyone how far away in miles you live, but in minutes or perhaps hours if you're unlucky. So I decided to create a re-design based on time instead of distance (normal maps) or simplicity (tube maps). By combining geographically accuracy with simplicity and time I started out with measuring the time it takes to travel between each station in the whole system."

See Oskar's blog for a whole lot more about this with photographs of each step it took to produce the map - it's a fascinating read.

Not sure how useful it would be as trains rarely run to time but I think it looks like a great idea and I wonder if the Transport for London or any professional mapping company would ever consider producing something like this?

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Thursday, December 01, 2005 Permalink COMMENT HERE
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