oddmart

More Clicquot Club…

Ampol road map for New South Wales, 1961. Ampol is Australian Owned.

From Jon Roma’s road maps collection.

Capitol Hill, Metro system map

I’ve traveled recently through cities with real rapid transit systems and have been reminded of just how easy it becomes to form a mental map of a city based on its transit map. My neighborhood in Seattle is served by a network bus routes that come every 10-15 minutes most times of day, so one can just wait at a stop without worrying too much about bus schedules. The bus isn’t as fast as a subway train, but the buses come almost as frequent. Looking at Metro’s map, however, it’s hard to form the same sort of mental map, as frequent buses are mixed with infrequent ones and unfamiliar routes are hard to follow visually. The map also makes it far from obvious that the 11 becomes the 125 and provides a single-seat ride from Capitol Hill to West Seattle.

Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Metro Transit helps highlight the more rapid aspects of the bus/light rail system there with the Hi-Frequency Network signage and map. I like the easy visualization of the high-frequency system (and the hi-frequency highlights on the main map), but I wanted to start local. The blog Capitol Hill Seattle provides a very local bus map, showing detail that can’t be found in the Metro system map. I’ve created a map somewhere in between a detailed local map and a systemwide map like the Hi-Frequency map or a subway map, and I call it the Octopus Map.

Capitol Hill Octopus Map

The Capitol Hill Octopus Map shows the major routes from the neighborhood to downtown, the U District, Central District, Queen Anne, and other neighborhoods. The extended version of the map includes more routes on the Central District side of things, as well as less-traveled routes like the 9 and the southeastern section of the 8. On either map, you’ll note that you don’t see every intersecting route nor every kink along the line. For detail down to the block level, go to Metro’s map for that particular route, or look for the bus stop location on Google Maps. For a broader overview, and to help form a vivid mental bus map for the neighborhood, try the Octopus Map.

For more on transit maps, and why a diagrammatic map can be such a good thing, check out the excellent Transit Maps of the World. It includes the Kick Map, seen below, which is my favorite NYC subway map. It’s less strictly diagrammatic than the Massimo Vignelli map, and more diagrammatic than the very geographic MTA map.

Kick Map, Midtown Manhattan

Extended Capitol Hill Octopus Map

Minneapolis Hi-Frequency Map

A couple weeks ago, I rode from Seattle to New York on Amtrak. One morning I awoke as the train shuddered to a stop in what turned out to be Toledo. The station there was unlike any I’d seen on the trip, as there were few great train stations built in this country during the 1950s. Toledo Union Terminal (now Martin Luther King Jr Plaza) was built in 1950, and in an architectural style more likely to be seen on a school (like my elementary) than a train station.

photo by Alan Loftis on MichiganRailroads.com.

photo by J/G on flickr.

photo by Enrico Webers on flickr.

photo by Patrick Rasenberg on flickr.

I saw this ad today and was impressed by the degree of detail in imitating something that’s apparently meant to look like it was published in 1933. Much “retro” design is a pretty shallow imitation of the original, and in particular, the technical limitations of the time are rarely adhered to or imitated. In this case, however, they do a few things right. The most striking part is the two-color design — it looks like this was printed with just a blue and a red plate. In particular, in “stay wet” you can see the blue bleed through the red (or vice-versa?). Such an effect isn’t hard to do in Illustrator, but it’s often overlooked. This section of the image makes me think of some of the beautiful bleeds done by Aesthetic Apparatus, though the text-over-halftone-photo seems like classic Aesthetic Apparatus style more than it does 1930s printing. Mis-registration (seen here at Aesthetic Apparatus) is a characteristic of pre-computer printing. In this case registration is almost perfect, though close inspection shows just a bit at the base of the bottle.

I like the graphic design in the ad, though I’m not familiar enough with design of the time to know how 1933-ish it really is. The bottle has an engraved look that I associate with catalogs of the time period, and is similar to the Hedcut style used at the Wall Street Journal since 1979. I love the scallops, though they make me think more of the 1970s than the 1920s and 30s. The Gay Nineties seemed to be a popular theme in the 70s (think Phineas Q. Butterfat’s), and the red scallops make me think of the red-striped gay nineties vest.

Now, is this ad “authentic”? Since I don’t see this ad being passed off as something that was created at the end of prohibition, I’d have to say that it’s authentic — it’s an image created in 2007 using the techniques available at the time. I think we may have an unhealthy obsession with authenticity at times. I don’t accuse 1950′s retro design, a favorite disfavorite of mine, of being inauthentic; it is its own genre, a generally cheap pastiche of design from an era with incredibly sophisticated design. But is this ad indistinguishable from something that would have been printed in 1933? I’m sure there are details, stylistic choices, or other subtleties that could disprove that. To my eye, however, it’s well done enough that there are no distractingly out-of-place details, and regardless of is perceived authenticity, it’s just a fun ad.

One of my favorite programs on public radio was one from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation called The Comfort Zone, where one could hear “[host] Alan Saunders debate and celebrate the cultural significance of architecture and design, landscape, gardens and food.” I started listening in early 2004, but sadly, its last episode aired on January 22, 2005 and was replaced by a general-interest program with a plan that sounds a lot like APM’s Weekend America. The show archives list lots of past programs I’d love to listen to, but they’re rather hard to come by. The weekly programs were available as a RealAudio streams, some of which I remembered to capture and save before they expired from the site. I checked into getting past programs on CD, but it’s expensive, as most custom-ordered copies of shows and transcripts seem to be. In this case, it’s AU$60.50 per program. Just over two years of programs are available, but that’s over 100 shows, or $6000, well beyond my weekly public radio expenditures. I even checked P2P filesharing networks, but This American Life and Wiretap are hard enough to come by, so it’s not surprising that there’s no Comfort Zone. Maybe some day the ABC will open up and just make old programs available, though I can’t say I’m that optimistic. Perhaps a bit more realistically, maybe they’ll dump more/all of their archives onto some pay service like audible.com. Though it seems less and less likely as time passes, there’s always the chance that a public radio organization in the US might pick up old episodes of the show. For now, however, these shows will molder away somewhere deep in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation archives.