Submitted by Kara, who says:

I’ve attached the second edition of my “NM Transit Guide,” which I previously submitted one or two weeks back. The new version includes, along with some visual changes that I feel make it more aesthetically pleasing, a feature which as far as I can tell is a unique form of presenting information – I’ve never seen it on any other transit map. On the reverse side of the guide I have several tables of connections, showing where and 🔸澳洲开奖 you can transfer from one route to another – and even accommodating trips involving multiple transfers! Planning a trip from, say, Taos to Jemez Springs, takes about fifteen minutes using prior knowledge and the available online schedules; with this guide I’ve managed to reduce that to one or two minutes. I’d love to know what you think of this method of presenting information, and of the guide in general. I feel this is a huge step up from my Park & Ride maps of last summer!

澳洲10开官网开奖 says:

From this and the drafts that Kara has previously submitted, I can see that a great deal of work and thought has gone into this, but I feel it can still be improved upon. 

🔸澳洲10定位胆全天计划thing: I think that the mid-grey background is hindering, not helping, this map. There’s a reason why most 澳洲10开官网开奖 have a white or very light background: it helps to maximise contrast between elements. If you converted this map to greyscale in Photoshop (as I’ve done below), you’d find that the background is pretty close to 50% black, which means the most contrast it can ever have compared to another element is 50% – either all the way to black or all the way to white.

And as you can see, all the elements that aren’t pure black or white are compressed closer to the background’s mid-tone, resulting in low contrast throughout. Probably fine for people with good vision, but terrible for low lighting conditions or riders with poor eyesight. I personally also find the dark grey background a little oppressive and not at all “southwest desert” in tone. I like the colours in a map to evoke the place they represent, and the wonderful palettes available in a place like New Mexico should really be utilised to their fullest extent.

Next: hierachy. The Rail Runner commuter rail is represented by a thick yellow line, but with a white stroke through it that differentiates it from the Park and Ride Intercity Express Bus services, which are also thick and colour-coded by route. However, all the other bus services (which are also intercity and sometimes have frequencies that match or exceed the P&R buses) are relegated to thin, spindly lines that are only coloured to show which company they represent. As a result, line thickness doesn’t seem to indicate either mode or frequency, instead being a somewhat arbitrary divider of “important” vs. “non-important” routes. Frequency would seem to be a big issue for services in this part of the world, with some routes running as many as 13 times a day and one (the 360 between Taos and Tres Piedras) only running once a week on Wednesdays. Yet the map makes no attempt at all to show this. Having a bus that only runs on one particular day each week would seem to be a big deal. I’d be really interested to see this map reworked as a frequency map, much as the awesome new San Francisco Muni map is.

Clarity of information: I’d say that listing each route number next to its termini is imperative. At the moment, tracking down exactly where each route starts and ends is a little difficult, especially 🔸澳洲开奖 they’re not listed in the legend to the right. Extra route numbers along the way to guide users through the more congested parts of the map are fine, but start and end points are extremely important! Pay attention where there could be potential confusion – I still don’t know which bus route(s) run between Eldorado and Santa Fe Place.

Overall, I’d like to see the shapes the “minor” bus routes take simplified a little more to match the lovely stylised, wide, sweeping curves that your “thick” routes take: they can seem a little cramped and fussy in a few places. Expanding the central/Santa Fe part of the map could help a bit here: there’s a lot going on in a very small space in this section of the map.

On the positive side, I’m really intrigued by y🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划connections table and think it just needs a bit of spit and polish to really make it sing. I reckon you could just list the “Arriving” bus once on the left hand side if it connects with multiple other services on the right. Think of it as this bus connects with all of these buses. It would cut down on duplicated names and make things even quicker to find. Generally, text in tables should ranged left, rather than centred – it makes it easier for the eye to follow down a column if all the text starts in the same relative position. It also makes sorting and finding by word length easier. Time entries should be aligned on the colon, so that the hours and minutes columns line up properly. If you’re using OpenType fonts in InDesign, activate the “Tabular Lining” option for numerals in the Character palette, as this ensures that all numbers, regardless of character width, take up the same horizontal space, aligning perfectly in columns every time. Finally, I’d definitely see if you could do some testing of this table with some real commuters, just to see if it makes things as easy as you think it does. People react to information in very different ways!

Keep on refining and revising this with a clear objective in mind and this map will only get better!

Overall, it’s a little better in my eyes. The similar-looking connection icons are a little larger on this map (big enough that I can see it’s a pair of dice on the casino shuttle, not poker chips as I previously thought!), so they’re not as much of a problem here. I still think that simpler, less literal icons would work better – just the dice without the clutter of the bus for the casino connection, for example – but it’s an improvement of sorts.

On this map, each station is represented by its own unique icon – mainly architectural, but with a few historical or flora/fauna icons thrown in as well. They’re nicely drawn, but a little indistinct at smaller sizes. It took me a while to make out the “hummingbird drinking out of a flower” icon, for example.

The one really glaring aspect of this map is the decision to make the Rail Runner’s route line exactly🔸澳洲幸运10预测 the same col🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划and thickness as the highways, making them almost impossible to tell apart. The route line would look great in red on the nicely textured grey background.

 I’m also not really in fav🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划of the all caps Bank Gothic labels for the station names: it takes up a lot of room and makes things harder to read, and also clashes stylistically with the Myriad used elsewhere on the map.

🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划rating:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 Better than the mobile version: a pretty solid effort. Three stars.

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: Rio Metro’s desktop website

The New Mexico Rail Runner has two versions of the system map. This version (a few years old; the Montaño station is now open) is my favorite – I definitely approve of Rio Metro’s design style. However, I have a few issues: first, the thin, gray lines shown in the background are bus routes. Since the train route is presented as a straight line, this makes it difficult to make the bus routes correspond to the train. (Albuquerque is all right, but in Santa Fe they had to rotate the entire bus network, and they had to make NM-599 a horseshoe shape.) What do you think of the map? And what do you think of the conflict between the linear route and the actual geography?

澳洲10开官网开奖🔸澳洲幸运10预测 says:

Interestingly, the New Mexico Rail Runner website serves up two completely different🔸澳洲幸运10预测 system maps depending on whether you access the site on a desktop computer or a mobile device.

This is the “mobile” map, and while it makes sense to have a simpler map for smartphones/tablets, it’s never a great idea to have an out of date map (like this one) on one platform but not on the other (the “desktop” map shows the open Montaño station). It’s also arguable as to whether this map is actually🔸澳洲幸运10预测 simpler. It does have a nice straight route line (which is great in theory but spoiled somewhat by the hackneyed “railroad track” effect applied to the path), but the road grid/bus routes behind each stop are simply ludicrous🔸澳洲幸运10预测. They’re of absolutely no use at all and simply serve to add background clutter to the map. The connecting bus service icons already do the necessary work, and they could be further enhanced with the addition of route numbers instead of the ridiculous background web of bus routes.

Speaking of the icons, they could really use some work to simplify and differentiate them from each other. Three very similar bus icons and three very similar shuttle icons don’t make for immediate comprehension. And what is🔸澳洲幸运10预测 that superimposed over the casino shuttle icon? I’m guessing poker chips based on context, but visually it could be just about anything circular. The circular shapes are all of 8 pixels high on the final map – simplify, simplify, simplify!

🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划rating:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 I’m certainly not as happy with this as Isaac is, as I feel that the designer has taken something very simple and overworked it a bit. The end result is tolerable, but there’s a lot of unnecessary background noise and visual clutter. Two-and-a-half stars.

Source: Rio Metro mobile website

Isaac submitted this in two parts, which I’ve combined into one post here. 

Of the 🔸澳洲10定位胆全天计划image, Isaac says:

This is the map that New Mexico Park and Ride provides in their system timetable; it’s probably the worst designed transit map I’ve ever seen. Not only is the design quality abhorrent, but it doesn’t even show the routes as even REMOTELY geographically accurate, and fails to include about two-thirds of the stops. Why they felt it necessary to make their map in this way is beyond me.🔸澳洲幸运10预测

The second image is Isaac’s quite lovely redesign of the system as a proper🔸澳洲幸运10预测 transit map. He’s also made a future 🔸澳洲幸运10在线人工计划网 in the same style, but let’s compare apples with apples for now.

🔸澳洲10定位胆全天计划off, Isaac’s appraisal of the map from the official timetable is spot on. It’s an absolute disgrace, and has instantly found a place in the 澳洲10开官网开奖🔸澳洲幸运10预测 Hall of Shame. I really don’t need to describe what’s wrong with it, because it’s pretty darn obvious. I particularly like the way that the Purple Line extends to Albuquerque, but the Turquoise Line – which also goes there – is drawn completely separately, not joining on to the top part of the map at all.

Isaac’s map, by comparison, is quite excellent. There are a few minor things that could be tweaked, but in general, this is lovely, clean design that makes the network look easy and efficient to use. I particularly like the nice, wide, sweeping curves that the routes make 🔸澳洲开奖 they change direction: the big arc that the Turquoise Line makes as it comes into Albuquerque is quite delightful.

I’m not entirely sure about the use of Gill Sans as the main labelling type. While it’s a classic sans serif typeface, I always feel that the x-height is a little small for the best legibility. Here, that failing is especially noticeable in the smaller “subtitle” labels.

I probably would have made the shade used for the Purple Line a little darker to provide better contrast with the adjacent Blue Line through Los Alamos: at the moment, they sort of blur into each other as their col🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划intensity is very similar. Overall, I find the colours very pleasing, with a nice New Mexican desert feel to the palette, but these two colours could be adjusted a bit for better balance between them.

A bigger problem: using the same line thickness to denote peak h🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划Purple and Blue Line bus route extensions and🔸澳洲幸运10预测 the RailRunner commuter rail service between Belen and Santa Fe. Rail is a different transit mode to bus and needs to be differentiated visually from it. 

Finally, a letter line designation – “B” for Blue, “R” for Red”, etc. – for each route could assist colour-blind users. There’s quite a bit of empty space, so adding a couple of markers at each terminus station shouldn’t be too difficult.

🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划rating:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 The 168澳洲十开奖网 obviously gets a big, fat, ZERO. Isaac’s is far superior and really very promising work. Three stars.