'@stamen's Geraldine writes about "a mix of the hand and the computer" behind creating textures for the watercolor maps'. There's been a whole week of posts about the various maps that's fascinating.

"SPUR asked Stokle to draw two transit maps for them (full disclosure—I edit SPUR’s monthly magazine, The Urbanist), with the intent of demonstrating how a single, unified transit map might provide greater accessibility and ease of use and to stimulate conversation about how transit decisions are made." The maps are interesting but I think flawed. More later, perhaps.

"The image above is a photo of part of a large map of London, created just after the Second World War and showing buildings that were damaged or destroyed in the Blitz. The map is the centrepiece of a small free exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive in Finsbury." Nice, but a scan online would be nicer (please?)

"Using a special PNG as a mask for an img element with a background-image property, you can turn flat-looking static maps into nifty skeuomorph-ized paper objects."

"Most notably Kartograph allows to select and fine-tune the map projection, which is like the fundamental equipment for telling stories with maps" If that doesn't already make you excited, this introductory blog post should do the trick. Lovely.

"The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011 celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, the foundational document that established Manhattan’s famous street grid." Closes 15 April, 2012.

"So what makes this map different from the Rand McNally version you can buy at a bookstore? Or from the dusty National Geographic pull-down mounted in your child’s elementary school classroom? Can one paper wall map really outshine all others—so definitively that it becomes award-worthy? I’m here to tell you it can. This is a masterful map. And the secret is in its careful attention to design."

"Ever thought what the tube network would look like if you took out the expensive Zone 1? Me neither, until this morning, when I was wondering if it was possible to utilise my current “Boris Bike” bikeshare 24-hour membership to save a bit of money on commuting in to work."

"What does seven billion look like? Dencity is a map of global population density as the world reaches this important milestone."

<p>"Our program downloaded the count of geotagged photographs in every 0.5 x 0.5 degree latitude-longitude square on the Earth’s surface."</p>

"Because it was very difficult to get the big picture on the phone's small screen, I thought to pick up a paper map at a gas station. To my dismay, the spinner racks were empty, with only a few maps of other parts of the state available. I immediately regretted throwing away my paper maps in a cleaning binge a few years back - I can easily imagine futures in which they will be worth their weight in gold."

From Stephen Walter, who drew The Island: "When London Transport Museum came to me for a new idea, I thought of it straight away – An Underground map of London where I could finally include those lost rivers and develop my own tube map. I am currently developing the ideas for this subterranean map of London and entries to this blog may contribute to its development." Possibly worth watching.

A table of hours and prices for museums in New York City, complete with sortable columns and a map. Could be handy.

Oh, this is nice- it shows the range of positions of the sun during the day. Handy for plotting when you want to take architectural photographs with particular lighting.

"Tentatively titled Conductor, it recreates the New York subway system as a musical instrument. It’s currently built in HTML5 + Javascript. SVG was very useful, as I could create the design in Illustrator, then import the coordinates into Javascript." "I decided to use Vignelli’s beautiful 1972 subway map as a starting point for the design."

A Lego map of Europe, complete with notable buildings in the style of the Architecture series. Impressive.

"Eighteen months ago I wrote about redesigning my site’s front page and mentioned in passing that I’d also created a page for every day which aggregated many things. I’ve now taken this a step further and added a map for every day which aggregates various pieces of location-based information about me." I've been thinking about doing this, but Phil actually has. Interesting musings about privacy in there, too.

Transport for London's Underground station entrance and exit numbers plotted onto a map. I'm not sure why this is concentrating on differences rather than pure numbers, but it's interesting.

Subtitled "A psychologist challenges the Beck gospel of Underground octolinearity", this is a short introduction by Maxwell Roberts in Eye magazine to the ideas he explored in his underground maps exhibition in Southend. (Must do something about getting that to London...)

Subtitled "A psychologist challenges the Beck gospel of Underground octolinearity", this is a short introduction by Maxwell Roberts in Eye magazine to the ideas he explored in his underground maps exhibition in Southend. (Must do something about getting that to London...)

Notes from a previous talk from Tim Fendley, this time with the addition of Erik Spiekermann of Meta fame. Some repeated points but also some other ones.

A very good writeup of a Tim Fendley talk about Legible London, which is slowly spreading from its West End trial area. I should keep an eye out for this chap speaking again; seems like it'd be an interesting talk.

"I'm not convinced that subway maps need to be "abstract," with massive distortion and nothing but forty-five degree angles, especially for small systems like Boston's." Well, no, but this unofficial design has a crowded central area which needs a pull-out (precisely what Beck's London diagram and its successors avoid). Meanwhile, details like the forced change at Ashmont is badly conveyed yet arguably useless information (neighbourhoods? distances? travel times?) is squeezed on. Still, maybe that's what suits the Boston psyche. (Jonathan Laban spends a good part of Soft City talking about how important neighbourhood is in that city.)

"Like a child drawing, the old BART map could take you on a flight of fancy, but wouldn't get you to and from work." However: "If I consider the old BART map in the context of the visual culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, I am no longer certain of its inferiority." An interesting piece touching on the cultural links between subway maps and the cities (or areas) they depict. (I prefer the new map, but then, I'm a Londoner.)

"an Oyster-generation map will need to show all the routes available to card users, the design has become too limited in its scope. Mapmakers have had their work cut out trying to fit all the information into a legible sheet of paper. For years, there have been maps on platform walls of the Overground mixed up with the Underground, yet these are scrappy – even ugly – things in comparison with the classic tube-only map." Slight ahistorical (it doesn't mention Beck's all-London maps, or the fact the Connections map dates from 1976) but Glancey still has something of a point.

"You are Here is an interactive map of the universe, as seen from the user's current location in space and time. The user holds a flat-panel screen which behaves like a magic window, allowing them to see continents, rivers, stars, constellations, and planets that are invisible to the naked eye." If you don't like video, read this instead.

A five-odd minute long video about a custom tablet that shows you the heavens and earth from where you are, complete with the planes of the ecliptic, projection of the equator, local streets and distant continents (through a wireframe earth). Amazing. Any chance of a port to a standard mobile device?

Well, there's a surprise. Boris Johnson finally gets wind of the minor press flap over the Tube map reworking, and blows a fuse. "I hope Londoners will imagine the Thames in place until it reappears on the maps, and will not forget their beautiful river."

"Acclaimed British artist Richard Long has designed the next Pocket Tube map cover for Art on the Underground" Bizarrely, there's nothing about the actual map redesign in this press release. Maybe this is a kind of large-scale A/B testing?

An exhaustive, well-written and readable look at the new poster and folder versions of the London tube map, complete with a comment thread featuring Max Roberts, author of Underground Maps After Beck.

The series of images overlaying the Apollo astronaut tracks to scale on London, from Apollo 11 up to Apollo 17, gives an idea of how much further the later missions could explore - and how much there still is to examine.

"There’s no denying how cool this is, but it seems that none of the app’s functionality would be lost if you replaced the video feed with a picture of Miranda Kerr. It’s a subway compass—a subway divining rod, even—so I have to wonder what good the “augmented reality” part really does." The AR sceptics are coming out of the closet, a bit.

Using the NYC subway station usage data: "I wanted to be able to scrub back and forth in time, so I started working on a ModestMaps-powered map with a time slider. After getting the data into the right shape, it was pretty quick to get something simple but interactive and visual up" This is really rather excellent - the UI has lots of neat touches (like animating on clicking the slider). It's only a shame that the chances of getting similar data out of TfL are so close to zero.

How long have Hackney Council had this not-bad-actually mapping + local data app? It's the sort of thing I would have expected Up My Street to do, if the smart people who set it up had still been there when the Google Maps APIs matured. Ho hum.

"we find that the streets of London form a self-organising system whose growth is characterised by a strict interaction between the metrical and informational space." via David Cantrell on (void)

An overlaid tube map for London (and other transit options elsewhere) is now available on Google Maps.

This was really great, before NPTDR forced it down. Of course, TfL pimp their travel tools on their site with lovely pretty iPhone icons, but when someone else does anything that's actually useful on the web, or for a mobile device, and which doesn't rely on crap Java servers with dodgy session tracking, and where all the information isn't spat out in PDFs, then licence trauma ensues. Bastards. TfL run the bus routes. The people who get the data from them should be as open as possible.

It's an A-Z, on an iPhone (or iPod touch). Handy especially for the latter (where you can't rely on a data connection), and of course it's far more detailed than the Google map tiles. On the other hand, £6 would buy you a paper copy: £4.80 (or whatever nearest App Store increment is) would be far more reasonable.

Everyone is, not without reason, very excited by the photos of London from the Air that Justin Hawke took, featured yesterday on boston.com's The Big Picture. I thought it would be nice to show where they all were, so here's a quick map. (Yes, I do evil client image sizing.)

Here's the official Google Earth blog and the post describing the launch of what seems to be accurately, but longwindedly, called "Sky in Google Earth".

I love WikiMapia- it's full screen and the URL dynamically updates, for example, which are both nice. Also, it has this wonderful location note.

Proposed 2016 Tube map. Also includes trams and some overground service. As used by the BBC, with alterations, on its story about the tube map being a design icon, despite it looking awful compared to the current map. (PDF)

"The London Underground map, the Spitfire and Concorde have been voted Britain's three favourite designs of the last century" but what's up with that thumbnailed tube map? They've ruined the Paddington corner of the Circle and the Central line!

Ripping off the Multimap feature, but with lag, and a horribly UScentric list of cities in a dropdown that doesn't work in Safari

dots!

On the 1970s diagrammatic New York subway map, and why it failed to catch on

Nothing like watching people stumble on a three year old (minimum) feature and doing mindless link propagation

Interesting, if press-release-sounding, UK map stuff

Interesting, if press-release-sounding, UK map stuff

Saw this in the magazine, but didn't look for it online, because I thought they'd lose the pictures. They haven't.

London maps (possibly the first time my "extended" and "tags" are identical) (until I normalised my tags thanks to mattb)

Saw this in the magazine, but didn't look for it online, because I thought they'd lose the pictures. They haven't.

Interesting. At some point I need to draw iso(times) across a London map- show the Tube as "wormholes"