The architect Jug Cerovic is one of Europe’s most prolific and distinctive transit map designers. Anyone who loves transit maps will love his book One Metro World, which contains 40 of his most gorgeous maps for cities all over the world, and also presents a clear explanation of his design process. (Unfortunately it doesn’t ship until January.) You can look at the whole thing on his site, but the physical book is much more satisfying.
Cerovic’s style is to recognize geometric forms in the geography, and to highlight these to create not just a clear diagram of network structure, but one with a certain minimalist beauty:
Cerovic’s new book, Middle Constellation, is about just one map, an infrastructure map of China. Here, the whole book is about the process. Page by page, he steps through the design choices, showing how he builds up the final map. This one is available as an ebook, which gives you an animated effect for some of the process. You can get a sense here.
If you like beautiful books, both are highly recommended.
I love Jug’s creativity and a big fan of his geometry and backgrounds. However I’m not sure about the wisdom of having a common solution for disparate systems. Also I’m concerned that as his London map has many faults ( http://www.projectmapping.co.uk/Reviews/londonrailjugcer.html ), what does this mean for the quality of his other maps? One just looks at them and thinks,’they are great’, but are they?