The California Rapid Subway System

California is OK at best when it comes to public transportation. But what if we were rockstars and decided to build a subway that connected the far flung cities and towns of the state? And what if that subway system was designed by someone who was perfectly insane? That was basically my design challenge.

My starting place was a blank map of California and the Barcelona subway map. Yes, Barcelona. The city in Spain with that great soccer team. The Barcelona subway map is very wide and flat. And California is kind of long and skinny. So I flipped the Barcelona map on its side and expanded it about 100X until it filled the state of California. Then I busted out Google maps and started to locate the actual cities and towns in California that happened to correlate with the actual subway stops on the sideways Barcelona map. And then I added a whole bunch of additional stops to make the map as expansive (and ridiculous as possible).

I designed the map in Adobe Illustrator, with help from Google Maps and some inspiration from Spain (which I've never been to). I've always wanted to convert this map into a four-color silkscreen, but haven't yet found the time.