USE DESIGN blog

Moscow Metro system is the city’s pride and joy, and one of the busiest, largest metro networks in the world. A network that gets larger every year, adding new lines and stations. If in the beginning the metro map was just the easy to recognize brown circle with each metro line crossing it at two points, but nowadays the lines have become so long that the new construction aims to interconnect them without actually crossing the Ring and without having to go through the city center to get to another side.
Art. Lebedev Studio was commissioned to design the next generation of the Moscow Metro Map, and here is a fragment of the final result:





Comparing it to the current map (see fragment below) I cannot help liking the old one more. It had somehow more « body » in its visual representation of the stations, but the typography on the Lebedev’s map definitely has a better readibility:





On their website Art. Lebedev show their design process leading to the final map, with some interesting deviations, inspired by metro maps of other cities. Personally I find the final version bleaker than some of the working ideas.

Tags: metro