Rail Trails: Timelapse Showing Drawings and Placement in Illustrator

 A (very) quick look at the way the illustrations are created and how we incorporate them into the various route sheets digitally.

Rail Trails: Bespoke New Illustrations

As we develop ever more routes, the need for bespoke line illustrations grows also to satisfy the need to create a couple of 'route focus' features per map sheet. We've been busy on these as well as the mapping; a single line illustration typically takes around 3 hrs to draw, scan and then process digitally so that it may best fit in with both the rail trails colourscheme and the spaces on the individual maps sheets. To date we've created a fair cross section of them - from canal barges to WW2 aircraft to sailing ships, knights, asparagus and with many more to come.. 

Rail Trails: And We're Off! The start of Walking Devts on Line 2 : The Wyre Valley Line

With the near completion in draft of all our Cotswold and Malvern Line routes (5 in total) we've now moved on to developing the next tranche of station to station walks in the WCRP area on the Wyre Valley Line. This runs north out of Worcester towards Droitwich and beyond.

Our first route (Worcester Foregate St station to Droitwich station) goes through some idyllic countryside, along old canal towpaths and passes near old WW2 airfields and takes a look at Roman Droitwich too.

Rail Trails: New Live Client Brief for University Design Students

The graphic design students on the University of Worcester's Graphic Information Design module received their new 'live' brief yesterday via Lyndon Bracewell (left in image) representing Worcestershire Ramblers and the Worcestershire Rail Trails Project. Design tutor Andy Stevenson (right in image and also working on the Rail Trails project which is promoted by the Worcestershire Community Rail Partnership) also helped put across aspects of the brief to best allow students to understand the client's 'asks'.

This trimmed-down design brief asks the students to develop 'working concept' artwork for a supporting brochure that will act as an overview to the ongoing Rail Trails project and which would otherwise have gone out for commercial tender.

The brochure will need to utilise many aspects of effective information graphics including simplified maps, diagrams and pictograms - all of which the students will be learning about as they progress on the module.

From the university's perspective, this new link up also provides a great example of research-driven teaching while tying in with an ongoing knowledge transfer project that the University is also helping with.

Rail Trails: Development of New Webpage Wireframes

We're busy developing and discussing the way the new Rail Trails content will look (and work for users) on the WCRP web pages at present.. Key considerations include: legibility and logic/ease of navigation. As such we're trying to cut out lots of additional sub pages and give users a 'quick hit' when it comes to accessing our various walking route sheets.

Rail Trails: Station Platform Poster Concepts

We're busy looking at possible visual themes to use to promote the Rail Trails project on station platforms and similar and are exploring ideas that relate to 'classic railway' style posters, quirky family countryside walks and the present hot favourite: sustainable travel and walking for all.

Rail Trails: Work Ongoing - First Draft Guide Sheets

 A 'sneek peek' at some work ongoing, we've now created 3 of the first 5x guide sheets in draft for the first phase of the project (the Cotswold Line). With luck we'll have our first tried and tested self-driven guide sheets available for free download in the new year.