As a student at Western Illinois University, I and many others used the buses around town quite often. The maps in place at the time were very unorganized and disorienting making the system hard to navigate. As my final honors project I volunteered to redesign the entire series of maps as I thought I could do a lot to improve them.
Over 16 weeks I spent time conducting research on the most effective ways to display charts, tables and graphs; along with analyzing major transit systems like the London Underground taking notes on what they did right and wrong.
I collected all routes, stops and times in an excel spreadsheet and used tables and formulas to find information totally hidden within the old designs. One of the major revelations was that all buses stop at City Center at the same times. All buses stop at 10 and 40 min after the hour. This was not apparent at all in the original.
Once all data was collected I remade the maps in Illustrator and combined everything in InDesign.
