Every city looks and feels unique. Regional culture, typography, dialect, local customs and many more factors play a part in defining a city’s differences.

Those differences determine how that city sees its citizens and how it wants to represent itself to others.

For each city with one, the metro plays a part in defining those differences. The metro maps in this post show the skeletons of these cities. Each map explores the paths taken by the residents of that city.

The design and style of the maps appears reflective of the particular place. They may be seen as not only maps, but individual expressions of a local identity.

Here’s a great compilation of metro maps from around the world… Read more

Ugly designs abound on the web, and behind each and every one of them is a “designer”.

In many of these cases the designers behind the sites are simply incompetent.

They’re often amateur designers or those who have little or no design training or people who design their own sites based on a book from their local library that’s ten years out of date.

But there are other times when the designer was perfectly capable of creating a better site.

So why would a perfectly competent designer create a site that isn’t very good? The answer is simple: they settled. It happens all the time. Read more