This post might seem a bit out of the blue, and a bit untraditional and “not along the lines”, compared to most of the previous posts on our blog – but it really isn’t. Working with mapping and researching new trends, technologies and tendencies, we are bound to work a bit with infographics also – because a graphical representation (in some cases) is the most reasonable way of describing what we do. Actually we have even got a couple of projects in the pipeline that specifically evolves around just that – the concept of visualizing information.
Last night I stayed up till way too late, trying to figure out how to visualize a very complex set of relations for one of these projects. It almost got the best of me, and actually it felt like quite a death-match. At the end I had to go to bed without solving the puzzle, to make sure that it wouldn’t drive me insane!
Visualizing relations and data and making these into diagrams, might seem like a very boring job to some people, but to me it certainly isn’t! In fact it can be one of the most difficult and challenging tasks for a graphic designer (depending on the complexity of the data-set of course) – and when you succeed in breaking the “code”, one of the most satisfying and rewarding too. On top of that, there is even the cool little fact, that info-graphics in some cases, is really something that can make a difference.

A very good example of that is the London Tube map, designed by Henry C. Beck in 1933. Prior to Beck’s design, London Transport had been struggling to find a good way of constructing the map, for more than 40 years (the first London Transportation maps dates back to 1889). The big problem was the difference between the heavy connotations of stations in the central part of the city and the more sporadic placed stations in the outer parts of the city. When they tried to fit all of the stations on to the map – even the most remotely placed ones – problems arose. On a regular poster-sized sheet of paper, the inner city stations melted together to one big lump, because of the long distances between stations in the outer parts of the city – and if they wanted to make the relations between the stations in the inner parts of the city clear (which they of course had to), they had to use extremely large sheets of papers – large enough to make the map impossible to put on display in the stations. All of this, because they couldn’t break the code and didn’t think out of the box, but viewed the map from a traditional cartographers point of view.

Henry C Beck wasn’t a cartographer but at technical draftsman, working for London Transport drawing diagrams of electrical circuits. The important thing in these diagrams weren’t where exactly the components were placed on the circuit board, but rather the relations between them. At some point Beck realized that the principles used in his job, might be the solution to the cartographers problems with the tube map, and because the principles were really easily transferable to the map, he sketched it out and presented it to London Transport. His proposal for the new map was promptly dismissed, because it was too radical a change – the only remaining reminiscence of the actual London geography was a stylized representation of the river Thames.

They urged him to keep working on it though, and after a bit of thinking they decided to give it a whirl and made a trial run of the map, inviting people to send their comments to the publicity manager. Unlike of the reaction of the cartographers team at London Transport, the general public understood and liked Beck’s map immediately, and the map almost hasn’t changed since (addition of new stations etc aside).
Not only did Beck solve a problem for London Transport (and the Londoners), he actually developed THE principle of how to visualize public transportation systems. The principles of his map isn’t just found in the London tube map anymore, but also in maps of public transport throughout the rest of the world too – New York, Sydney, Cape Town and Copenhagen to name a few.

When we talk about the great ventures in graphic design, Beck and his map is only rarely mentioned. I think the reason is a combination of its simplicity and its worldwide presence. The principles behind it has made precedence and how it works has become common knowledge, and most people are instantly able to decipher the public transportation maps when they come to a new city – because the principles are universal. We don’t even notice it or have to think about it, we just use it.
I’m not sure that I would go as far as calling it a masterpiece, but it certainly is one of the pieces of graphic design that has played a role in most peoples life and helped them with something that would be very difficult to do otherwise – and it certainly deserves more mention in design-history than it receives.
When sweating over my piece of info-design yesterday and not knowing how to solve it, I really found comfort in at least knowing that something that appears to be as simple as Beck’s map appears to be, has had such a difficult birth and has taking such a long time to develop. I’m sure that I will break the code one of these days too, and solve the task I have set out to solve – and I’m sure that when I do, it will be quite rewarding.