Tube Map — Make your own – Stéphanie

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template elements to make a London style tube map, with colour code for the lines, icon on a grid paper view — *Created with Draw.io*

A while ago, I saw Sanjay Poyzer’s journey to become a service designer. I decided to use the same idea to map my professional journey for LinkedIn. I didn’t have any fancy software, so I used draw.io as it’s free.

tube map with 3 lines from schools journey with subjects studied to starting at GDS — From the blog post “Become a service designer in government: step by step”

Draw.io is not the easiest tool but the result is good once you get used to it. Here is a French version of my LinkedIn profile background. I’ll share with you how to do your own.

my professional journey represented as a tube map, from France to Scotland, from IT to design via video game support

People love the London Tube map iconography

It’s been adapted in various ways. Some examples:

Metro map on a drawing of a human face and neck with lines for arteries and nerves — *From this Evening Standard Edition*

map of London Tube with number of minutes to walk from one station to the next on the same line — *From Transport of London PDF map*

Glasgow tube map

I hope your professional journey doesn’t look like that, even though looking at it is very calming

Circle orange line outside and grey line inside with animated metro circling in opposite directions — *From Glasgow subway stories*

How to make your own tube map

First, draft it on paper

It’s not that easy to plan for enough space for labels, lines crossing and making sense of the things you will group together and why. So, like for any design, start with pen and paper. Don’t use the fancy tools just yet.

Ready? ok, do it with draw.io now

You can chose any colours, but if you want it to look like the London tube map, here are the colour codes:

#000000 black

#0616B4 dark blue

#0198D4 light blue

#980059 purple

#E22219 red

#F7AABA pink

#FDF01B yellow

#037B35 green

#AD6300 brown

#A3A2A5 grey

Get the template, it will be quicker

I’ve made a template to make it easy for you. I can’t share the file here but you can find it in my Github repository using this link, then select Raw:

screenshot of github repo showing the raw button with a red arrow

screen full of characters showing some xml unreadable code

in your browser menu, select File, then Save as
give your file the name of your project and the extension .drawio

Using Draw.io

In your browser, open draw.io, and select ‘Open Existing Diagram’

Select the file you have just created and this should open the template which looks like the top photo of this post.

Simply select a line in the colour you need in the template, copy paste it where you want on screen and play with it, to make your tube map.

Or modify the existing templated map if you prefer.

If you want something really clean, you will have to link elements like ‘lines’ to ‘circles’ so when you move one, the rest moves as well. The documentation can help.

Some tips

When you copy/paste an element and want to move it next, it’s easier to deselect it (click somewhere else) and then move it. It avoids transforming it when you don’t mean to.

When lines endings are ‘covering’ your connection circle, simply select the circle, then in the right column, select the Arrange tab, and then To Front. This should sort it.

menu showing the Arrange tab selected and the button To Front

To make an ‘elbow’ in a line, make sure the line is the type selected below (it should be if you’re using the lines in my template)

show the selected options for the line. It should be rounded and the shape of connection is a straight line at a 45 degree

Select one ending of the line and take it where you want it to go. Then click in the middle of the line, hold and drag to form the angle you want. You can do that again to form another elbow, select again the middle of the second part of the line as shown on the video below.

this is a animated gif showing the steps stated above in the instructions — Ctrl C, Ctrl V, to deselect the red line: click elsewhere, then drag the line where you want, select an ending and drag where you want it to go, click the middle and drag to make the first elbow, then click again and drag to make the second elbow.

How did you make this video?

In case you wonder: I used a free Google Chrome extension called Nimbus to record my video, then download it as a .webm which I converted into a .gif using Cloud Convert (also free). This 30 seconds video is now a 2.6MB gif.

Other things you can do with tube maps

You can explain the various ways a customer can find your service and the different journeys depending on the channels used for example.

tube map showing how the customer find a service: 1line for face to face one for phone, another online and various outcomes

Now make your own!

Disclaimer: this is not an ad for draw.io, I’m not affiliated with them in any way, just simply like to use it as it’s free. You can reach similar results with other software.

Edit 08/05/20: Draw.io is now Diagrams.net

Edit 06/06/20: If you have Illustrator, this video explains how to create a tube map using it:

Edit 24/02/22: David O’Brien (one of my ex-colleagues) submitted a template to Miro so do go and use it, it might be even easier for you than Draw.io

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