Matt Harrison explains how his firm, Transport Designed, redesigned the network map for Northern, a train company that handles passenger services across northern England, from Liverpool to Newcastle.

Northern’s historic network map, whilst representing the sheer size and scale of the train operator’s network, didn’t actually show you where you could travel to and from.

It represented the network as an amorphous blob of interconnected dark blue lines, but did nothing to communicate the intricacies of how to actually get between any two places.

That was our starting point.

How do you represent such a vast network, and make it make sense in a way that customers can quickly and easily understand?