Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map

Nebulae, web mavens, and what the Kaballah has to do with 100 years of music history.

In 1931, Harry Beck designed the first diagramatic map of the London Underground. By 1960, the Tube Map had evolved into the icon of minimalist modern design that we know and love today — a meme, even. And as any meme, it has spawned a number of creative derivatives. Today, we look at five such tube-map-inspired gems.

MILKY WAY TRANSIT AUTHORITY

A dreadfully long subway commute can often send you scrambling for ways to bend the space-time continuum. Now, one scientist has done just that — sort of. Samuel Arbesman, a Harvard postdoctoral fellow in computational sociology, has created The Milky Way Transit Authority — a brilliantly simplified map of the Milky Way displaying the complex interconnections of our galaxy in a digestible way.

Beyond the clever visualization concept, we love the fusion of science and philosophy in Arbesman approach:

People ask why I haven’t marked ‘You Are Here’ on the map – but I think it’s more humbling to realize that we aren’t the center of the universe.” ~ Samuel Arbesman

We also find it fascinating to think of the incredible and daunting vastness of the universe in such mundane terms — there’s something eerily soothing about this hop-hop-there-it-is approach to the celestial expanse.

GOING UNDERGROUND

Exactly four years ago, the ambitious folks at The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog set out to plot the branches and connections of 100 years of music on a London-Tube-style map. From Ray Charles to Radiohead, the project is an impressive feat of musicology and cultural history.

Each line represents a different genre, with the influential musicians in it as the stops.

We strongly encourage you to explore this priceless and fascinating blueprint to 20th-century music culture — grab a high-res PDF here.

KABALLAH TREE OF LIFE

Making sense of religious doctrine can get messy and confusing. This tube-style map of the Kaballah Tree of Life, first spotted in Alan Moore’s comic book series Promethea, attempts to shed light on the Sephiroth — the ten attributes of God in the Kaballah.

Despite the seeming simplicity of the map, it plays on many of the Kaballah’s sacred numbers and relationships. The three columns, for instance, arrange the ten sepiroth according to the three pillars — the Pillar of Mildness, the Pillar of Mercy, and the Pillar of Severity. And the twenty-two lines connecting the sephiroth reflect the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

To make things even more elaborate, adding the 10 sepiroth and 22 lines together makes 32, the number of Masonic degrees and the number of Kabbalistic paths to wisdom.

SOMERSET TOURS

We’re big believers in using something familiar as a metaphor that introduces and piques interest in something new. And the folks at the Somerset Tourism Bureau in the UK tend to agree — so they created this wonderful Heritage Touring Map based on the London Tube Map, featuring seven thoughtfully curated “lines” of tourist attractions and must-sees.

Already a clear box-breaking thinker in tourism communication, the Somerset office even has its very own Vimeo channel, including seven short films, one about each tour “line”.

WEB TREND MAP

Every year, Japanese-Swiss design studio Information Architects maps the web’s biggest influencers, subway-style. The project’s latest installment, Web Trend Map 4, is an absolute masterpiece of design, data visualization, and digital anthropology — which, in fact, has enjoyed a level of viralness deeming it worthy of being on the map itself.

Sure, WTM may be based on the Tokyo Metro Map, but that was actually built borrowing heavily from the London Tube Map, so it’s just a matter of degrees of creative separation.

We’ve just ordered a great big glossy poster of it for the Brain Pickings HQ, and we’re jabbing our pin right between TED and BoingBoing — so here’s to putting Brain Pickings on the map. Web Trend Map 5, that is.

BONUS

We’ve featured it before, to a great response, so it’s worth mentioning the MBTI Personality Map and its psychosocial genius.

Each subway line represents one of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types, arranged based on the semantic distance between the 39 core word descriptors. The outer circle contains the 161 original word descriptors from the MDS test, grouped into 8 layers based on hierarchical order. Finally, the colors of the words intuitively represent their meaning — so “calm” is in the blue spectrum and “passionate” in the red.

Information design for the social sciences — now that’s something we’d like to see more of.

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Subway Personality: The MBTI Map Visualization showing the relationships between human personality descriptors from the MBTI test, using subway lines as a metaphor for the connections between the different representative words and personality types....
Writing Without Words: Visualizing a Book Literature as a canvas, a book as a living organism, and rhythm as a texture -- an incredible visualization of text. ...
Art Meets Science: TMBG’s Creative Education They Might Be Giants' latest children-themed video album, Here Comes Science, is a brilliant testament to the power of creativity in education....
Into Post-Digital Creative Culture: OFFF 2009 Highlights from OFFF festival 2009, a celebration of post-digital creativity and our new relationship with visual media....
Creative Pause: Todd St. John & HunterGatherer Animation and illustration from the bleeding edge of design culture. ...

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 5:45 am in art, culture, design and was tagged art, cool, culture, data visualization, design, history.

Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map: Nebula, web mavens, and what the Kaballah has to do with 100 years of… http://bit.ly/aNeP8n

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

andrewmsmyth on February 8th, 2010 at 5:53 am

Amazing – Creative Deriviative of the tube map: http://ow.ly/151IY

truedigital on February 8th, 2010 at 6:26 am

5 creative derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/14VSD

brainpicker on February 8th, 2010 at 6:30 am

lovely, but not smelly RT @brainpicker: 5 creative derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/14VSD

LukeMackay on February 8th, 2010 at 6:31 am

RT @brainpicker: 5 creative derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/14VSD

yelena_ on February 8th, 2010 at 6:31 am

5 creative derivatives of London Tube Map http://ow.ly/14VSD RT @brainpicker: [+ Patterson The Great Bear] http://bit.ly/4vokNl [on my wall]

tonyveitchUK on February 8th, 2010 at 6:37 am

RT @brainpicker: 5 creative derivatives of the #London Tube Map http://ow.ly/14VSD

tatorandtots on February 8th, 2010 at 6:42 am

RT @brainpickings: Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://bit.ly/ao1zrm

BibliOdyssey on February 8th, 2010 at 6:43 am

RT @BibliOdyssey: RT @brainpickings: Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://bit.ly/ao1zrm

annefgreaves on February 8th, 2010 at 6:48 am

RT @BibliOdyssey: RT @brainpickings: Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://bit.ly/ao1zrm (I’m uncredited at no. 3…ahem)

johncoulthart on February 8th, 2010 at 6:49 am

Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map: http://bit.ly/ao1zrm

piktografika on February 8th, 2010 at 6:52 am

Ad-agencies; Plagiarism! http://bit.ly/dfONy3 Everyone else; Creative! http://bit.ly/byVv5o

hpeikemo on February 8th, 2010 at 6:53 am

RT @piktografika: Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map: http://bit.ly/ao1zrm

Designer023 on February 8th, 2010 at 6:59 am

Derivatives of the London Underground map: http://bit.ly/9hGgxF

mg_creative on February 8th, 2010 at 7:26 am

Creative deriviatives of the London Tube Map – feat the Guardian’s music map & the Web Trend map http://tr.im/Nknp via @lukemackay

katybeale on February 8th, 2010 at 8:02 am

http://bit.ly/apbv7J Very cool creative derivatives of the London Tube Map. I especially enjoy the Milky Way map.

benwarmuth on February 8th, 2010 at 9:00 am

RT @ericrumsey: The London Tube Map and its Meme-Driven Creative Derivatives (@brainpicker): http://bit.ly/9tOvqp

heidigoseek on February 8th, 2010 at 9:19 am

RT @heidigoseek: RT @ericrumsey: The London Tube Map & its Meme-Driven Creative Derivatives (@brainpicker): http://bit.ly/9tOvqp < @bounder

pigsonthewing on February 8th, 2010 at 9:28 am

RT @ericrumsey: The London Tube Map: http://bit.ly/aS0bFQ and its Meme-Driven Creative Derivatives (@brainpicker): http://bit.ly/9tOvqp

jonfernquest on February 8th, 2010 at 9:28 am

RT @brainpicker Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/1oimIE

ARedLetterDay on February 8th, 2010 at 9:53 am

Oops, sorry about the broken link: 5 meme-driven creative derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/157r5

brainpicker on February 8th, 2010 at 9:56 am

RT @brainpicker: Oops, sorry about the broken link: 5 meme-driven creative derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/157r5

russ_tomato on February 8th, 2010 at 9:58 am

timpsk on February 8th, 2010 at 10:02 am

m0ff on February 8th, 2010 at 10:02 am

(If you missed it) Five creative derivatives of the iconic London Tube Map meme http://ow.ly/15fLc

brainpicker on February 8th, 2010 at 4:10 pm

Cool-RT @brainpicker: (If you missed it) Five creative derivatives of the iconic London Tube Map meme http://ow.ly/15fLc

Schwartzie14 on February 8th, 2010 at 4:13 pm

RT @brainpicker: (If you missed it) Five creative derivatives of the iconic London Tube Map meme http://ow.ly/15fLc

fabrikade on February 8th, 2010 at 4:41 pm

RT @brainpicker (If you missed it) Five creative derivatives of the iconic London Tube Map meme http://ow.ly/15fLc

ViewFromEngland on February 8th, 2010 at 4:45 pm

Fascinating Information Design! “Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map” http://j.mp/dt8XHq

herbert68 on February 8th, 2010 at 7:16 pm

You arent the centre of the universe.
RT @brainpicker Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/1oimIE

KisJayEnn on February 9th, 2010 at 12:11 am

RT @ARedLetterDay: RT @brainpicker Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://ow.ly/1oimIE

beingboring on February 9th, 2010 at 12:19 am

LONatt> http://j.mp/agM72f Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map | Brain Pickings…

rssGreatLondon on February 9th, 2010 at 2:25 am

Creative Derivatives of the London Tube Map http://bit.ly/9KWZg3

superos on February 9th, 2010 at 2:24 pm

tdr siang dl ah……… >_< http://plurk.com/p/3pwsdt

nevell_k144 on February 9th, 2010 at 11:40 pm

Creative Derivatives of the London Tube #Map http://bit.ly/9KWZg3

Wayfinding_UK on February 11th, 2010 at 1:29 am

RT @Wayfinding_UK Creative Derivatives of the London Tube #Map http://bit.ly/9KWZg3

beaweb on February 13th, 2010 at 3:57 pm

Five creative derivatives of the iconic London Tube Map. http://ow.ly/15fLc @brainpicker

Ninja_Kangaroo on February 14th, 2010 at 10:35 am

RT @beaweb: RT @Wayfinding_UK Creative Derivatives of the London Tube #Map http://bit.ly/9KWZg3

orbemapa on February 14th, 2010 at 11:43 am

RT @orbemapa: RT @beaweb: RT @Wayfinding_UK Creative Derivatives of the London Tube #Map http://bit.ly/9KWZg3

ramiroaznar on February 14th, 2010 at 11:45 am

I do do do want this subway-inspired bathroom tiling http://ow.ly/1aSab (And more tube map goodness: http://ow.ly/1aSb8)

brainpicker on February 24th, 2010 at 10:40 am

@JUSTYVETTE RT @brainpicker: I want this subway-inspired bathroom tiling http://ow.ly/1aSab (And more tube map goodness: http://ow.ly/1aSb8)

CAO916 on February 24th, 2010 at 10:46 am

RT @brainpicker: I do do do want this subway-inspired bathroom tiling http://ow.ly/1aSab (And more tube map goodness: http://ow.ly/1aSb8)

Yenisei23 on February 25th, 2010 at 11:09 am

RT @cao916 RT @brainpicker: subway-inspired bathroom tiling http://ow.ly/1aSab (& tube map goodness: http://ow.ly/1aSb8) LOVE THIS STUFF!!

JUSTYVETTE on February 26th, 2010 at 4:48 pm

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