A More Polished Re-Design of the DC Metro Map

• October 4th 2011

by UrbanTurf Staff

Back in November, Portland-based graphic designer Cameron Booth released a fairly clean and intuitive re-interpretation of the DC Metro map. The map was so well-received that it won the People’s Choice Award in the Greater Greater Washington “Redesign the Metro Map” contest. However, a number of GGW readers had recommendations for tweaks that could be made, and on Monday night, Booth released his third and final version of the map with some of those revisions included.

From Booth’s blog:

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.

Booth, who has a 17-year resume as a graphic designer and an admitted passion for transit maps, had already done a poster of US interstates in the style of the London Underground’s Tube Map, when he decided to re-interpret the WMATA map last year.

“I’m going to be blunt here. I simply don’t like the current one,” Booth told UrbanTurf in November. “Heresy, I know, but there it is.”

This morning, Booth told UrbanTurf that he is “100 percent satisfied” with the latest diagram, and that he never expected all the interest in his version.

“To be here almost two years later, where a lot of people are now saying they prefer mine to the revised Lance Wyman draft is pretty amazing,” he said.

For more information about the new design, click here.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/a_more_polished_re-design_of_the_dc_metro_map/4281.