Poster with same named metro stations in the former USSR cities
Creation history
While living in St. Petersburg in 2016 and frequently traveling to Moscow, I discovered that both cities had subway stations with identical names, such as Mayakovskaya, Dostoevskaya, Pushkinskaya, and others. Curious to know if other Russian cities also had such stations, I researched the topic on Wikipedia and compiled a list. Although I made a few unsuccessful attempts to visualize the data, the project was ultimately abandoned.
It is not clear why I then decided to connect stations of the same metro with lines, and not stations of the same name in different metros
In late 2021, while going through old files, I came across a chart that caught my attention. Despite being unused, I couldn't let it go to waste and decided to spruce it up and share it on Twitter.
To my surprise, the
tweet garnered 2.7K likes and was even covered by '
Moscow News' and '
Paper'
As I read through the replies, many people mentioned similar intersections in cities like Minsk, Kiev, Kharkiv, and others. This inspired me to create a summary table for all cities in the former USSR.
These data were already enough to make a big and beautiful poster. I am making a dark background for greater expressiveness. To increase its expressiveness, I opted for a dark background. Next, I searched for the appropriate size of the station circles.
After considering options, I settled on an average size, which was expressive but not overwhelming or chaotic. I also thought about painting the lines in gradients, but for that I had to make them twice as thin, otherwise they took all the attention.
Then I'm separating the countries with a cross-hatching. I'm taking the font Montserrat – a free geometric grotesk with pretty normal Cyrillic, also wide, to compensate for the high vertical elongation of the table. I'm adding an interesting history of the renaming of one station in Tashkent, as well as little Easter eggs.
