v7.1

Sneak preview: Hollow line style

Shannon Turner

Dec 23, 2024 — 2 min read

The Hollow line style illustrating when the Silver line was under construction

Today's post is another new line style coming in version 7.1, a hollow line style similar to Hollow Open (London Overground) but instead of the lines being open, they're capped with a flat edge.

Whenever I add a new line style, I typically test a dozen or more variations of the style to make sure it will look good with all of the many combinations of line widths and station styles. The same is true of adding new station styles.

I also find it really helpful to return to my designs after a while and look at them again with fresh eyes. This can sometimes mean development goes more slowly, but I think it's worth the tradeoff because you end up with better results.

That's what happened with the Hollow line style, in fact. Originally, I'd designed it to have a rounded line cap, similar to the solid (default) line style. I think a rounded line cap looks pretty good – but I think that if the line had a flat line cap, it would be used much more often than the rounded version:

Side-by-side comparison of two different possible ways of drawing the Hollow line style. I think a square line cap will see more use. What do you think?

Maybe I'm wrong – maybe you want both versions! Let me know. It's easy to add; my only hesitation is I don't want to add too many options to the line style menu before I've added better ways to manage the number of styles. (I've got an idea about how to do that well coming in the next post, stay tuned.)

(Sidenote: seeing the way the lines overlap on themselves in this screenshot makes me want to prioritize a change to the drawing algorithm to smooth it out, so they're drawn as a single continuous line, which I think would look better for most lines. A topic for another post, another day!)

Anyway, I think this hollow line style is perfectly suited to showing a line that's under construction, but I love how creative you all are. How do you plan to use this line style? To show night/weekend service? Express trains? Or something else?

I look forward to seeing the maps you make, and hope you enjoy the new version when it comes out. Make sure you're subscribed to email updates so you don't miss the announcement -- you can be the first to know when 7.1 is released!