Katy Dickinson

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http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/date/20060804 Friday August 04, 2006

Subway Map Game

For the last five years, Danny Cohen and I have been building up our joint collection of subway maps. Both of us travel a good bit and are fans of good design and, in particular, interested in the worldwide influence of Harry Beck's 1931 London subway map. Our collection is carefully labelled and pinned up on a cork board on the wall outside of Danny's office in Sun Labs in Menlo Park, California.

Along with the maps is a London Transport Museum poster of Harry Beck's original. Some of the maps up are color printouts from the web but most were collected by Danny or me or other Sun map fans on trips. The game is to find subway maps from different places showing clear design descent from Harry Beck's original.

Danny just came home with a map of Oslo. In total, we have:

In a web search, I find that there is a book by Ken Garland: Mr Beck's Underground Map (Capital Transport Publishing 1994), and even a set of Wikipedia entries about this. We are not alone!

Danny just said we should ask people to send us maps for our cork board. If you find a subway map not listed above which is clearly related to Harry Beck's original, please send it to:

Katy Dickinson
Sun Microsystems
16 Network Circle, Mail Stop: UMPK16-164
Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA

Posted at 05:20PM Aug 04, 2006 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |