Legibility of Public Transit Iconography
Winter 2022 - Rhode Island School of Design
Instructor: Trevor Herman Hilker
No subject matter or medium was off the table in the Drawing Fictions course. I chose to explore drawing techniques for Boston’s MBTA system.
The first image uses the existing transit map as a base.
The second image uses an axonometric view of Boston and Photoshop generated tiles to parse the transit lines.
The pixelated images pull from a satellite image. The image was reduced to 8 colors. Transit line colors were indexed (given priority). The image was reduced to 64 pixels square, 32 pixels square, and 16 pixels square with the stipulation that transit lines must be at least one pixel wide.