Typography as design

Travel

There are certain things that require text as the bulk of their design feature, for example TV Guides and more famously, the London Tube Map.

Harry Beck produced the famous London Tube map in 1933 and it is still going strong today being a globally recognised piece of design work. An example of timeless design.

Comprised of simple linear representations of all the tube stations supported by the London Underground, the London tube map supports the power that design has on people, with its ability to change how we view things. Many people thought that the distances between each stop on the map represented the relative actual distance between them but in order to achieve clarity, the designer had the power to distort the distances in order for the diagram to be at a size that people could deal with.

It is an example of how simple can be effective. The map is shown just by coloured lines yet is such an influential piece of artwork. Criticisms of the design have included the fact that there is one line; the Northern Line represented by a black line with the text of the stations is also displayed in black. Designers have tried to rectify this problem but the reality is it is always going to be hard to create a perfect piece of design when you have so much textual information to be displayed.

The beauty of this design is that it is so well recognised and people have used imitations of the layout to display other things on mockery posters etc. It also works at various scales and with the amount of information contained on the map it is amazing how it can just work on so many different scales and still be legible.

This tube map replaces tube stations with band names throughout the years. An interesting piece of media for The Agriculture.

http://www.theagriculture.com/images/time_sensitive/underground.gif