April Fools’ may have come and gone, but who says the fun has to end? This MBTA map, styled in the spirit of the MTA’s design, is my belated contribution to the day’s shenanigans. It’s a nod to the MTA map’s distinctive style—quirks and all.
Missed deadline aside, I had alot of fun trying to create this map – and alot of frustrations. The program that I gave glowing reviews to in my last post does not handle text very well. I had to spend a few hours manually adjusting places where text overlapped or spacing was uneven between letters, and fixing messed up intersections where road lines don’t quite reach the rest of the intersection. I hope I fixed all of them, but the map is so massive that there’s a good chance I missed some – if you spot any errors, let me know!
This map really gives you a sense of how… sporadic the MBTA’s service area is – as compared to the MTA map, where the subway more or less covers the entire city.
I don’t know that there’s much else to say about the design process (I know, inspirational writing right here), so without further ado: here’s the finished product:
(Click on the image for a full-res PDF)
