Designer Eddie Jab­bour has redesigned (unof­fi­cially) the subway maps for New York City. The new designs focus on ease of use and sim­plic­ity. Most impor­tantly, they shows how very unim­por­tant accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tions of geog­ra­phy are for things like subway maps.

Jab­bour works for Kick Design. His work on the subway maps can be seen at the offi­cial site here:

• Offi­cial Kick Map Com­par­i­son

The dif­fer­ences between the cur­rent offi­cial NYC map and Jabbour’s maps are strik­ing. It’s most appar­ent when view­ing the entire subway system at once.

• Whole map com­par­i­son

I think that Jabbour’s designs are just plain pretty. Being not quite so famil­iar with NYC, Jabbour’s designs make me feel some­what warm and fuzzy at the thought of riding the subway. This is a dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent feel­ing than the one I had the last time I was in NYC look­ing at a subway map to figure out how to get from Queens to Man­hat­tan, and then around Manhattan.

There is an inter­est­ing arti­cle on 37signals about Jabbour’s designs and his inten­tional dis­tor­tion of geog­ra­phy to sim­plify the map of the subway system.

• Help­ful dis­tor­tion at NYC & London subway maps

The 37signal arti­cle uses the London Under­ground as an exam­ple of where this strat­egy has been used before. Of course, since I live in Boston, I was imme­di­ately think­ing of the MBTA maps.

I think I lived in Boston for about a year before I real­ized how not geo­graph­i­cally accu­rate those maps were.

There’s some more brief com­men­tary on Kottke as well.

Via Daring Fire­ball.