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Comment by ainar-g | Hacker News Reader

Ilya Birman's work is greatly underappreciated. His Moscow Metro map proposal[1] was pretty cool, and his commuter rail map[2] summarizes the routes much better than its predecessors.

[1]: https://ilyabirman.net/moscow/metro/map/2016/

[2]: https://ilyabirman.net/moscow/rail/

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Birman had kind of an ongoing ‘rivalry’ with the guy who made the Metro map at Art. Lebedev (which became the official one)—in that both maps were developed and updated at the same time, with public progress reports and resulting education of the hipster masses on transport map design. But to find meaningful differences between the two maps, you pretty much had to whip out a magnifying glass. The two dudes also constantly nodded at each other's designs, and you could really see the micro-decisions at play, down to line thicknesses and distances to the labels.

Frankly, personally I'm more captivated by the above-ground maps by both the Bureau and the Studio: the latter have at least the largest-format Metro map, with the city's points of interest, whereas Birman participated in stuff like this: https://ilyabirman.ru/ekaterinburg-metro/2016/

Also, it seems like his work is actually being used. He designed all the street plates for Chisnau, the capital of Moldova and they look pretty cool.

https://ilyabirman.net/chisinau/

He also has written beautiful e-books on UI and Transit Maps design:

https://bureau.rocks/projects/book-ui-en/

https://bureau.rocks/projects/metro-en/

Thanks for pointing this work out. Great design.

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