The Harry Beck Effect

Harry Beck (1903 - 1974) was employed as a draughtsman by London Transport. It was he who designed the famous London Tube Map which made its first appearance in 1931. Before that time the lines were always shown on scale maps. This was not at all a satisfactory arrangement, as the stations were squashed in tight in Central London and spread out in the outlying areas, making it impossible to work out any sensible route. Harry Beck realised that all passengers wanted to know was how to get from where they were - to where they wanted to get to. To them the distance between the stations was irrelevant. So he abandoned the any idea of scale in his design and set all the stations the same distance apart. Instantly the whole Underground system became diagrammatically crystal clear.

Strictly speaking his map was not a map at all but a geoscematic diagram. However, if no one strongly objects I will continue to call these sorts of diagrams maps. The idea came to him, we are told, from similar diagrams used to map sewage systems.

To put it mildly, Harry Beck was an enthusiast. No only did he take his work home, he had a room devoted to it, where he laboured and tinkered, improving his design each and every evening into the late hours. There were no computer programs in those days of course. It was all done on a drawing board using a T-square and set square. He had some very fixed ideas on design. For example all lines had to be horizontal, vertical or at forty-five degrees. A line at thirty degrees to the horizontal would not be tolerated. Later, other designers abandoned this rule of his and it must be admitted the designs loose something of their aesthetic appeal. He also had the vision to use colour. He was the first to use a different colour for each line so familiar to us now. Before that time they were all uniformly black. This too helped make his map very easy to understand and follow. It says a lot for the original design that it has stood the test of time so well. It had a great quality of flexibility built in which enabled it to be brought up to date as the Underground improved without destroying the original concept. The New York Subway, the Paris Metro and just about every railway in the world, including our own national railways have adopted this style of railway map.

I understand the enthusiasm some players have for those rough pencil sketches they drew, long, long ago, now dog-eared, coffee and blood stained (as one player put it) and very much loved. I am also aware that there are those who scorn the use of maps in MUD entirely. And if you can get through The Maze every time without the benefit of some sort of visual aid, I have nothing but admiration for you. But the rest of us need maps. The primary consideration for any MUDMap is that it is accurate and easy to follow. There is also a secondary consideration that it should be pleasing on the eye. Both can be achieved by following Harry Beck’s principles together with an imaginative use of colour. As in the London Underground system, in MUD, only direction matters; the scale distance the rooms may be apart, or their relative size, are of no interest to us. However far apart they may be ‘on the ground‘, it takes the same amount of time to travel from one to the next - an instant.

The actual techniques used to make a MUDMap have been covered elsewhere and in some depth. I will only concern myself with the application of Beck’s principles to those maps.

If for example a direction goes NW from a room, not only should it leave from the NW corner but it should go out at forty-five degrees and not some other angle. So often you see lines coming away from the correct corner of a room but in totally the wrong direction. Compare the following alternative solutions to a design problem where because of some restrainst elsewhere, the NW/SE routes are not at 45 degrees when joined by a single line and ask youself which gives the clearer direction.

And take the following example where you leave one room E but the return route is NW. Not an uncommon phenomenon in MUD. Which of these is clearest?

And a N/S route where one room is not immediately in line with the other:

Remember you may be in a hurry and a glance is all you get.

Coming to the use of colours, they can be used to distinguish between the other directions used in MUD (like UP and DOWN and JUMP). I distinguish these by using different coloured arrows. I mentioned Harry Beck’s use of colour to distinguish between the different lines. You can use colour similarly to mark out the routes you generally follow. But it has are other uses as well. You can, for example distinguish a Dense Forest from a Pine Forest by two different shades of green, or have the rooms in different areas colour-coded, say bright red for Dragon Island and light blue for North Mountain, or use a different colour for each level in a buildings or below ground. Any use of colour to make the map clearer and easier to understand is a good thing.

The important thing to remember is, when you are suddenly up against it, and have to move quickly and have to consult your map in order to do so, the map has to be firstly accurate and secondly easy to follow. If you follow my suggestions you will not go off in the wrong direction (probably) and be able to easily pick out a quick route.

Incidentally Harry Beck was paid just five guineas (£5.25) for by London Transport for his design.

The tube map

Beck's London Underground Map

Newbie Central: Making a Map