Building my Tram Map/

In this project I had planned to make a new map for the Tram Network, this was apart of my rebranding plan because I felt that the current map provided was not as accessible and was confusing to use for passengers. The current Tram Network map of Helsinki was not available at tram stops either, the only record I could find of the tram map was on Helsinki City Transport’s journey planner website.

Below is a gallery of the type of maps I took inspiration from to build my current map.

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Sometime in March I presented my FMP pitch to be peer and tutor assessed. Simon recomended that look into a company called ZeroPerZero because they made some vector style city maps. This Japanese company made graphic style tourist maps of cities like London, Tokyo, New York and Seoul.

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To build my Tram map I first selected a decent image of map of Helsinki’s landscape and went over the image using the pen tool. I then had to select the main roads that the tram network use and I made plotted them on top the landscape. I wanted my map to be straight and refined for minimalism so I when I plotted the roads I used guides.

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Finished Map

This is my finished version of the tram map, I went with a dark theme when I created this because it would contrast better with the colours I used for the tram lines.

Whilst planning this piece and researching the outdated maps I realised that Helsinki had exactly 10 tram line (excluding H lines that are practically the same) so I developed my colour pallet using 10 distinct colours to represent them. I did this by borrowing some of the same colours from Werklig’s rebranding of the city, I slightly modified some of the colours for better contrasting and I added a few and removed some.

Some of the tram stops on this map are inaccurate since I did not have a lot of time to produce this outcome whilst developing my custom typeface which was the main idea of my project.

Overall I am not very proud of this map, I enjoyed all of the research and development into making this piece but I feel that the finished design could have been worked on more and made more accurate. I feel that making the Map in Dark Theme was a bad decision while making a Finnish Design piece which would be brighter, I only chose the dark theme because of how well it would have contrasted to the tram lines. I had hoped to use my typeface in the map to show areas of Helsinki but I cut this because of time and I did not want to overcrowd the map.

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References:

https://www.hel.fi/helsinki/en

https://www.hsl.fi/en (Map resource)

https://zeroperzero-jp.com/?category_id=60ac567050a48a0fdda8d7a1