Finally, a Moscow Metro Map that deson't look like a Soviet relic

http://www.fastcompany.com/1660583/finally-a-subway-map-for-moscow-that-doesnt-look-like-a-soviet-relic

by tomh • 16 years ago

30 19 16 years ago

aw3c2• 16 years ago

Call me traditionalist but I quite like http://www.wtr.ru/moscow/eng/metro/metro.html

The columns make it much faster to scan over station names. And its got local character while the other just looks like any other western metropolian map. The new one looks tentacly somehow. The "connectors" on the old one are great.

Oh, it's just an Artsy Lebedev project...

asdflkj4• 16 years ago

A big flaw in that one is that you almost can't tell which name belongs to which station, near the center. This could be fixed as easily as making the names same color as the lines. Dunno why they didn't do that.

lkozma2• 16 years ago

"the studio has an excellent play by play of its design process, which seems rather courageous in a country that doesn't exactly encourage the sharing of information"

Now that's a quite broad generalization.

noahr2• 16 years ago

That's not a generalization at all. There is a bill before parliament there right now that would give the Federal Security Service broad censorship powers. And independent journalists in the country are being murdered, and the police appear to be uninterested in solving the crimes. From the Committee to Protect Journalists: "18 press killings have gone unsolved since 2000. Two of the journalists killed in 2009 worked for a single newspaper, the independent Novaya Gazeta." http://cpj.org/reports/2010/04/cpj-2010-impunity-index-getti...

asdflkj4• 16 years ago

In Russia journalists get killed time to time (mostly by overzealous provincial lords); in the USA they never say anything worth killing for to begin with. They wouldn't get killed, but they would get sued and/or marginalized, and that's enough to keep them in line. Is it really freedom if everyone's too afraid to exercise it?

Remember that guy on TV who got fired for suggesting that 9/11 highjackers were in fact not cowardly? Russian media, bad as they have it, would laugh at this sort of culture.

P.S.: I speak Russian and get to see some of that Russian media in action, unlike most of you who only hear rumors about it from your ideology syndicate of choice. There are probably other Russian-speakers here who know more about it than I do. I'd like to hear what they have to say.

lkozma2• 16 years ago

Even with your addition, I stand by my point: getting from these facts to the statement that it is surprising/curageous for a design studio to blog about their process is a broad generalization. They are basically unrelated things.

nmk• 16 years ago

Another recently developed alternative by Ilya Birman:

http://ilyabirman.ru/english/moscow-metro/

And another one by Viacheslav Ilinskov:

http://www.artdragon.ru/

IMO, both are better as far as the aesthetics of the connecting stations is concerned.

cema• 16 years ago

Another one that does not look like a Soviet relic, or like anything else at all: http://pics.livejournal.com/mi3ch/pic/00324y15 (from http://mi3ch.livejournal.com/1038793.html [ru]). Not that I would use it as a map, exactly...

huhtenberg• 16 years ago

Wow, really nice. Thought this will require a redesign of a carriage to match :)

Terretta• 16 years ago

Comparing the proposed map with the current map (the 2nd map in the article), it's clear that the river provides scale and locality, allowing better association with one's mental above ground map.

Put back the river, and the proposed one would be better. Without it, a tremendous amount of context is lost.

fix3r• 16 years ago

London's tube map almost lost the river recently, too, but they quickly put it back on the map.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

It must be nice, having a metro system where your biggest concerns are the spatial and typographic qualities of the map.

There are stations (perhaps entire lines) on the our very own Chicago Transit Authority that look a lot more like a Soviet relic than that old network diagram.

richcollins• 16 years ago

I'd like to see the "Soviet relics"

iskander• 16 years ago

The old one is easier for me to read and easier to grok as a map. Is this a case of design aesthetic winning over functionality?

Finally, a Moscow Metro Map that deson't look like a Soviet relic

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