Here’s another fantastic old transit diagram taken from the pages of the 1974 Graphis Diagrams annual (see also this concept Helsinki Metro map). This minimalist diagram of Rotterdam’s transit was designed by the firm Tel Design, who were also responsible for the corporate identity of Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS or Dutch Railways) in the 1960s. The creative director, Gert Dumbar, formed his own design studio in 1977 and continued to do work for NS through the 1980s, creating the visual language of the railway which is still very evident today.

The diagram uses a clear colour-based visual hierarchy: black and the NS logo for main line rail. blue for the Metro (at the time, the only one in the Netherlands), and red for trams and buses. I think black numbers are for trams and red numbers are for buses, but I could be wrong. Points of interest get white numbers in black boxes, and are explained at the bottom of the map.

There’s a very pleasant simplicity to the whole thing, although it’s perhaps missing a few too many contextual cues to be truly useful – street names, etc. Still, it’s a lovely example of classic mid-1970s Dutch minimalist design and worth a look.

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: design et typo

The lovely 1970 Dutch train map featured in my previous post was brought to my attention by the author of this map – a pitch-perfect recreation of the current IntercIty network in the old map’s style. Apart from a bit of welcome clean-up to the islands at bottom left (a big improvement in the clarity of the cartography here), everything else is faithfully rendered – including the odd little notch taken out of the south bank of the Afsluitdijk, which I can’t really see a reason for on either map.

Veen notes that Nederlandse Spoorwegen still uses the “A” through “H” designations from the 1970s for Intercity lines today, so there’s quite a bit of commonality between the two maps. There’s some extra granularity in the modern network, as most of the letters are broken up into “a” and “b” sub-designations as well. Veen shows this by giving related lines similar colours, which works quite effectively. There’s also a few “non-letter” IC routes that have been worked in quite nicely as well. I don’t think Veen’s thicker station ticks are quite as elegant as the hairline ones used in the 1970s map, but they do the job.

Overall, a thoughtful adaptation of an old map’s style to show the current system. A fun design exercise, and very deftly executed.

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: AS Veen/Flickr

The coastline at the bottom left gets a little complex compared to the simplicity of the rest of the map, and all the type is angled (but at least all on the same axis!), but otherwise this is really quite lovely. The single thin black tick across the route lines to indicate a station is simple and effective, even on stations like Utrecht with multiple lines passing through.

🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划rating: Fantastic early-1970s European design. Clean and elegant. Four-and-a-half stars!

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: Wikimedia Commons – I’ve cleaned up and brightened the picture for publication a bit

Design-wise, the map is nice and clean and easy to follow: the longer highways have reassurance markers placed along their length to keep you on track. The urban areas are called out with a minimum of fuss, but help to give valuable context to the road network – however, maybe Maastricht could be included as the obvious “final” major destination of the A2 before it exits the country?

Another interesting excercise here – if up for a challenge! – might be to overlay the European E-Road network on these highways to give a broader pan-European context to the network as well. For example, the E-19 route starts in Amsterdam, follows the A4 through The Hague, onto the A13 and A20 past Rotterdam, before heading south on the A16 into Belgium. The other two-digit E-Roads in the Netherlands are the E-22, E-25, E-30, E-31, E-34 and the E-35.

Overall, this is a lovely effort that simplifies the highways of the Netherlands down to their simplest elements, and looks good while doing it.

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: asvdveen/Flickr

Dave points out that the map  was created in 2009, so the routes may or may not be totally accurate now (I seem to recall a Sprinter train that ran through Schiphol to Amsterdam 🔸澳洲开奖 I was there in late 2010, but I may be wrong).

Have we been there?🔸澳洲幸运10预测 My sole experience with NS trains has been from Schiphol to Amsterdam Centraal and back again.

What we like:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 Looks fantastic🔸澳洲幸运10预测. A very clean, stylish and oh-so-European diagram. The typography is particularly nice (I can even forgive the 90-degree angled type because it’s handled so deftly). Different levels of service are denoted through use of col🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划alone – a dangerous approach 🔸澳洲开奖 considering color-blind users – but there’s enough contrast between those colours for it to work relatively well (I ran the map through a colour-blindness simulator to check this).

What we don’t like:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 Major hub stations where every train stops could benefit from an “interchange station” style marker, rather than individual dots on each line. This is especially true for all the “Centraal” stations. The final destinations of routes that leave the Randstad are labelled within the route lines themselves, which makes them a little small and hard to read.

🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划rating:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 Excellent. 4 stars!

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: Dave Kramer

Have we been there?🔸澳洲幸运10预测 No.

What we like:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 The routes themselves are shown very clearly, with interchange stations and the National Rail system given the right importance. In fact, this would be a quite excellent example of European transit map design if it wasn’t for one thing…

What we don’t like:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 The hideous blurry background. Quite possibly the worst🔸澳洲幸运10预测 attempt at rendering geography on a transit map I’ve seen yet. It’s not realistic, it’s not diagrammatic, it’s just… fuzzy. I can only guess that the reasoning behind this was to make it clear that this is not an accurate to-scale rendering of the landscape, but it just ends up looking indistinct, out of focus, poorly executed and a jarring visual contrast to the clean diagram placed on top of it.

🔸澳洲幸运10冠军定位计划rating:🔸澳洲幸运10预测 A quality diagram poorly let down by a terrible background. Two-and-a-half stars.

🔸澳洲幸运10开奖官网开奖结果走势图🔸Source: Official RET website