Not one of his best efforts, it seems to me.

The flights of associated companies being shown in black are much more prominent in the diagram than those of Imperial Airways, shown in a rather weedy reddish. Or perhaps they just faded?

Then the daily flights between, I assume, important routes are shown in a rather inconspicuous way with dashed lines, whereas the less frequent routes have solid colour. It's impossible to guess, without looking at the key, which routes have the greater frequencies. I'd have thought it would be a rather basic precept of graphic design to have prominence of the line proportion to service frequency, or at least proportional to something useful. And the representations of summer-only and winter-only seem to have no connection to each other.

Maybe this was a draft and he did a better one later?


On 28/10/2017 16:18, Recliner wrote:
It seems Harry Beck didn't confine himself to designing non-geographic Tube
maps. I came across this Imperial Airlines air route map he created in
1935:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNOBfs-W0AA3KJm.jpg:large

Air routes were rather infrequent back then, and Beck came up with a rather
complicated way of showing weekly, twice-weekly, etc frequencies. It seems
that even back then, airlines had alliances, but were more open about
code-shared flights than they are today.


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Clive Page