the service tag
Designed: Kickmap, The New NYC Subway Map
About three years ago a new NYC subway map design by Eddie Jabbour, graphic designer for Kick Design, started to find its way to the internet. It had issues but it was much better than the current MTA design in that it tried to focus on stations instead of trains. People using the subway want to get from point A to point B in the shortest possible time so they look for stations close to those points, not for specific trains.
Encouraged by the positive feedback, Eddie contacted the MTA but was quickly put off:
… when he showed up at the agency’s Midtown offices with copies of his work, they were quick to find fault with it. According to Christopher Boylan, the transportation authority’s executive director of corporate and community affairs, who recalled the meeting, the main criticism was that Mr. Jabbour’s map, like Mr. Vignelli’s, was artistic but geographically inaccurate. “He’s a good designer and it’s an interesting map,” Mr. Boylan said. “The design is important, but the thing we’re concerned with is the best directional guidance. We design a map for use, not solely to look good, and we think it looks good.”
Original map on the left, the Kickmap on the right.
But Eddie Jabbour is not a man easily deterred. He works on his maps on weekends and nights with the feedback of his 17-year old daughter.
Criticism that Eddie’s map is geographically inaccurate is inappropriate as most people use road maps or street signs for that type of information. As previously mentioned, the usability should focus on the key features of subway lines - something the Kickmap gets right.
Mixing Your Feeds: Yahoo! Pipes
“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.”
Sounds complicated? Well, it isn’t! Use Yahoo! Pipes to remix and query all kinds of news feeds. As a typical Web2.0 application it can be controlled via simple Drag & Drop and doesn’t require any special knowledge. Try it out or have a look at existing Pipes.
Tingelets - Bookmarklets for Designers
Tingelets is a new, free and practical service for designers and developers. Basically it’s a set of bookmarklets that you can place in your browsers bookmark bar for immediate use. When you click on them, they highlight various elements in the current page. You can highlight tags, elements by id, elements by class and even tag sets (for example <ul> and <li> as a combination). Since they work in almost every web browser, they give you the possibility to compare web layouts on the fly.
The Tingelets are the newest project from Maurice Kühlborn and they are extremely well done. When you click on a tingelet, the corresponding element or elements are highlighted with transparent PNGs which display the name of the highlighted element.
It’s a perfect and quick solution for troubleshooting and diagnostics without having to resort to external tools like Xyle Scope.
Design News - All in One
aetherworld.org is now a proud member of Design-Feed. Design-Feed is an online aggregator site for the most interesting design related RSS feeds on the web. What sets apart Design-Feed from other aggregator sites are the hand picked feeds. This means you can get all the latest, and best, graphics and web design news in one place, rather than browsing through hundreds of sites every day. Every post aggregated is also searchable by keyword.
“Basically, it’s a one-stop shop to get all the latest web-design buzz. If you are familiar with MXNA, you can think of this as MXNA for designers”, says Felix Turner, creator of Design-Feed.
Read up on Design-Feed here.
