Official Map: C-TRAN Bus Network, Vancouver, Washington, October 2023

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Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Transit Maps has never taken a look at the map for Portland’s northern neighbour, the (original) Vancouver. With the recent addition of their second “The Vine” BRT route along Mill Plain Boulevard, now seems like a good time.

At first glance, it seems to be a pretty solid map with some nicely simplified geography and routes clearly delineated. To my eyes, it seems to take some design cues from Spokane’s celebrated bus map (especially the dotted route lines for express services), though it’s certainly not as polished. However, closer inspection reveals a map that just seems really unfinished.

The first major problem? There’s no legend. There’s nothing on this map (or on the C-TRAN website) to quickly and easily explain what all the different lines and colours actually represent. The bold red and green “The Vine” lines are obvious enough, and you can intuit that the mid-blue lines are regular local bus services, but then why is Route 2 a slightly lighter colour? What does a thick dark blue route mean? Why is Route 105 a solid yellow line, when the 105X is a dotted yellow line? And then there’s the large green areas, which are meant to indicate C-TRAN’s “The Current” rideshare zones, but end up looking for all the world like parkland without a legend to tell you definitively otherwise.

Some digging around on C-TRAN’s website eventually gives the answer to some of these questions, but also raises more along the way. It looks like Route 2 is a lighter shade of blue because it only runs on weekdays? A thick dark blue line should indicate a “Regional” route, which for C-TRAN means that it provides connecting service into Portland but isn’t a downtown express route (these are the yellow lines). These routes all have “Regional” in their name with a “6x” route number, and require a higher fare than a local bus within Vancouver. This causes inconsistencies, however, as Route 71 is shown as a Regional bus when it runs entirely within Vancouver, and the “67 – Airport Regional” is incorrectly shown as a limited-stop local service (a light blue dotted line, which should be reserved for routes with a “4x” number). The only difference between the 105 and 105X that I can see is that the 105 stops in downtown Vancouver on its way to/from downtown Portland, which somehow makes it “local” enough to earn a solid route line? Strange.

Some other unfinished or inconsistent elements: there’s some explanatory text on top of the downtown area that looks like there should have been a white box behind it. Some similar routes merge into each other (see the 105X and the 190), while others run concurrent to each other. The way that the routes south of Fisher’s Landing get cut off by the edge of the canvas as they turn onto SR 14 is careless. All the routes that go off the map should have an indication of their final destination.

Our final word: The bones of something good, but just seems really unfinished. It’s almost as if some layers were turned off accidentally before the file was exported, because it’s hard to rationalise the complete absence of a legend for the map otherwise.

UPDATE 10/27/2023: The design team from C-TRAN reached out to me via a Twitter message to let me know that the map has been updated. The new version addresses just about every one of my concerns, and is a great improvement. The source link below should take you to the new map now.

Source: C-TRAN website

Historical Map: Lines of the Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway, 1927

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Here’s a fascinating map of streetcar lines in Omaha, Nebraska in 1927, beautifully hand drawn on top of a pre-printed single colour map of the area produced by the City’s engineering department. Not only does the map show the extent of all the streetcar lines (with 64.6 miles of track), but also colour-codes them to show which predecessor company originally laid down the tracks. The original Omaha Horse Railway Company, founded in 1867, is represented by a healthy 12 miles of track! All the companies shown in the legend were absorbed by the Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway Company (O&CB) by 1902, which continued on as the Omaha Traction Company until being succeeded by Metro Area Transit in 1972. On this map, the “Council Bluffs” part of the name is only represented by showing the loop that cars used in Omaha to turn around.

It’s not quite clear who added the hand drawn elements to the map: the O&CB was a privately-run company, but the base map was drawn by city engineers. Text that reads “Exhibit No. 7” down the bottom right suggests that this is one of a series of maps, either about the streetcar system, or the city as a whole. A report to City Council? One thing is certain: the draftsmanship is meticulous in its execution, and the lettering used is superb!

Some historical notes: the City Superintendent named on the base map, Roy N. Towl, became mayor of Omaha in 1933 and served one term before continuing on as a city commissioner for many more years. The Omaha Traction Company itself is perhaps most infamously remembered for the violent streetcar strike of 1935, when the city was put under martial law to restore order.

Source: Omaha Public Library Digital Collections

Historical Map: San Joaquin County, California, c. 1910

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Here’s a beautiful old illustrative map – this is from a prospectus advertising the benefits of settling in San Joaquin County, California in 1910. Part of depicting this as a desirable place to live and do business is showing the multitude of modern railway lines – including several electric interurbans – almost all of which seem to converge upon Stockton, neatly in the middle of the map.

This being an advertising tool, the situation shown is one of a promised future – text beneath the map notes that some of the railroads are actually only partially built or planned… but they’ll be finished really soon, we promise! It’s a technique that was often used in sales brochures of the time: here’s another one from Pullman, Washington in 1911 that shows an electric interurban line from Colfax and Spokane that never actually got built.

The map itself is charming: mostly to scale, but with big chunky roads and railroad lines overlaid on top to emphasise their importance. Little trains chug along their lines, and the whole thing looks sort of like a Railroad Tycoon game in progress. The interesting colour palette is a result of the lithographic printing process, which didn’t use CMYK inks like modern printing. To me, this looks like three or four inks were used – black, sky blue, orange and perhaps yellow as well (the clean yellow areas just don’t look like a tint of the orange to me). The clever overlaying of these inks allows other colours like green and a darker blue to be created.

Our final word: Decorative and evocative; it does a good job of painting the county in the most positive light.

Source: David Rumsey Map Collection

Submission – Official Map: Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Map at Bergenline Avenue Station

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Submitted by Kara, who says:

At the (extremely cool) Bergenline Avenue station, [my partner and I] stumbled across this official map that I’d never seen before, depicting both the HBLR and the PATH! It was actually all over that station, and it’s definitely a relatively old map, because we also found a slightly different version (that matched the usual map by depicting the weekday-only line with a dashed stroke) that was dated to 2015.

I also have to give this map a major shout-out for a very clean and recognizable portrayal of the network, and for showing PATH connections clearly and thoroughly without cluttering the map or distracting from the HBLR routes. (And the stretched style of the transfer stations is absolutely lovely; I haven’t seen that anywhere before.) The font differences on the labels for Bergenline Avenue and the two train stations are basically my only gripes, as the map isn’t clear on what those mean. (Okay, I do also hate the little jog north of Richard St.)

Anyway, I think this map would honestly have the potential to be instantly recognizable if it were only used in more places, and I figured you and your readers deserve to see it too!

Transit Maps says:

Aaargh! This is so close to being great that it hurts. From Exchange Place upwards, it’s fantastic – clean and clear with a lovely and distinctive slanted angle that brings unity to the design… and then it all falls apart as soon as the lines turn the corner to Essex Street. Angled labels that are way too close to their station marker, wobbly route lines and weird clashing angles. It’s almost like two separate maps jammed together into one!

Kara’s right about the “stretched” transfer stations at Exchange Place and Newport, though – those are just lovely. And the PATH lines are dealt with fairly deftly as well: obviously subsidiary to the Hudson-Bergen lines, but visible enough to show the interconnection between the two systems. I’m not sure that “PATH” needs to be emblazoned on the lines three times, though… once is probably enough to be understood.

As far as the different font choices go, I’d say that the all-caps label at Bergenline Avenue is simply meant to be a “YOU ARE HERE” marker, while the treatment of Newark Penn and Hoboken Terminal is simply reflecting their relative importance as transit hubs. Yes, it could be explained in a legend, but I think the meaning is clear enough. The locality labels are set in the very old-fashioned Copperplate Gothic – that’s a first on a transit map for me!

Finally, I’m not sure about the map being old: there’s clearly a label that says “©2011–2020 New Jersey Transit Corporation” at the bottom right of the map, so it has to have been printed in 2020 or later, though it could perhaps represent a previous period in time. An oddity for sure. Is this map unique to this particular station?

Our final word: This diagram’s confidence seems to have deserted it halfway through, which is a pity. Committing to that stylish slanted angle from top to bottom would improve this immensely.

Historical Maps: Private Railways and Extra-urban Tramways of Italy, 1936

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I stumbled across this atlas of maps the other day and had to share. A few sample pages are below – head to the originating website to view all 20 of them. Enjoy!

Source: Stagniweb.it

Unofficial Map: High-Speed Rail of France, 2023 by Lars’ Transport Maps

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Well, this is just beautiful.

Having made my own diagram on the same subject matter way, way back in 2011, I think I’m qualified to say that this is a rousing success. The maps have some similarities – routes are colour-coded either by their Paris origin station or operator (Yellow for Eurostar, burgundy for Thalys, Pink for the low-cost Ouigo service, etc.), and the Paris stations are the undeniable focus point of the map. But where I opted for a circular ring of stations around Paris, Lars has hit upon the genius idea of using a pentagonal system. This not only looks great, but also leaves a gap to the north-east where his icon for the Eiffel Tower slots very neatly into a position similar to the one it occupies in real life. Lovely!

And this pentagonal shape isn’t just superficial, either – it forms the centre point of a comprehensive grid system that rotates 72 degrees for each of the map’s sectors, as seen in the image below. It’s an incredibly clever solution that lends a lot of clarity and sophistication to the map, and I love it. It’s just so much more suited to the depiction of the network than a standard octolinear diagram.

Lars has also encoded a lot of useful information to the map – general service frequencies (though he notes that this information is hard to come by, as the SNCF doesn’t really believe in online timetables any more), the names of the LGV branches, selected winter services, and whether or not all trains call at a particular station. I find the “dotted outline” symbol for this possibly the weakest part of the map, as it breaks up into an indistinct shape rather than being immediately recognisable, but this is a pretty minor quibble. And we get icons for major landmarks dotted around the map for some visual interest as well – bonus!

One thing that could be looked at is some of the minor lines that pass underneath the main trunks – in some locations, it can be a little hard to tell where they go or where they join another route – the line from Le Havre just sort of disappears somewhere near Massy TGV and the “slow” TGV down to Miramas winds back and forth hidden behind the main line, and looks quite disjointed as a result. This may just be a stylistic choice to emphasise the importance of those major trunk lines, though we always have to weigh up the trade-offs when doing something like this.

Our final word: Fantastique! The clever usage of an unusual pentagonal grid works brilliantly to make one of my favourite maps of 2023.

Source: Lars’ Transport Maps

Historical Map: Sydney Railway Layout, 1953

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Unearthed on Twitter (It’ll always be Twitter to me, no matter what Elon says) by @crossing_lights, this is quite an extraordinary find.

Long-time readers may have seen the 1939 version of this diagram (and the digital recreation that I made). Here’s the thing: the general consensus has always been that this was a one-off attempt at something in the style of H.C. Beck’s newfangled London Underground diagram. I seem to recall that one theory even had it that the 1939 diagram was produced for visiting dignitaries from London Transport and was never even seen by the general public. Jay Foreman’s “Unfinished London” video on the history of the Tube Map (Part 2) even suggests that Beck himself drew it (to which I say, “Poppycock!”)

But yet, here’s this later version of the map – even though all we have of it is a black and white archival reference photo, not the actual printed piece – which shows that there was at least one further edition/revision. I’d say this is a facsimile of a printed brochure, as there seems to be evidence of a fold line running down the page between Penrith and Kingswood. Careful examination shows considerable differences between this version and the 1939 one.

The most obvious of these is that this diagram is properly typeset (using Gill Sans throughout) instead of the neat handwritten labels from the 1939 version. This actually presents quite a few problems: whereas the handwritten labels could be subtly adjusted in size and width to squeeze longer names in, the typeset labels are all the same size and are pretty unforgiving, layout-wise. The label for Macdonaldtown station now takes up so much room that the designer was left with no choice but to angle the labels for Stanmore, Lewisham and Ashfield (starting a long tradition for angled labels on the Sydney rail map!). Wentworthville has been flipped to the other side of its line simply because the label would run into the Carlingford line if it was on the other side! There’s quite a few places where the spacing of the labels is pretty unsatisfactory: Merrylands is way too close to Granville, for example, and there’s plenty more if you look. However, they did fix the label at Kirkham on the Camden Line!

The parallel lines heading south from Sydenham have been redrawn poorly, with the section from Sydenham to Kogarah being much further apart than from Carlton to Hurstville. Very curiously, the section of the City Circle from Wynyard through Circular Quay (here, just “Quay”) to St. James has been drawn in by hand – perhaps just an addition to this archival print? St. James itself is still denoted by a terminal tick, as this section was very much still under construction in 1940 (Circular Quay station finally opened in 1956!).

The archival records for this map simply and vaguely date this diagram as “pre-1962?”; my dating of c.1940 is because Dumbleton station has been renamed Beverly Hills (August 1940), the Ropes Creek line hasn’t opened (March 1942), and I definitely think that this revision would have been produced fairly shortly after the original 1939 version.

Update: This “No. 2” map has been definitively dated to 1953 in this Twitter post by @crossing_lights, which shows the obverse side of the pamphlet from the NSW Government Archives. Though it’s been permanently glued down so that the map is hidden, adjusting the histogram in Photoshop clearly reveals this diagram on the other side. Quite remarkably, that means 14 years have elapsed between the 1939 “No. 1” version and this one. This does explain the omission of the Kurrajong Line from this edition, as it closed in 1952. It therefore seems probable that the Ropes Creek line, with its limited passenger service, was deemed too unimportant to show on the diagram.

Our final word: A hitherto unknown second attempt at a “Beck-style” diagram for the Sydney rail network. Like its predecessor, it’s not entirely successful, but it’s fascinating to know that it even exists!

Source: Museums of History NSW

Submission – Unofficial Map: Brussels S-Train by Elliot H

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Submitted by Elliot, who says:

I’ve come across this blog a couple of months ago, and have been lurking ever since. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at designing a trasit diagram, and having gotten some free time, I decided to redesign the S-Train diagram for Brussels. So here it is, my very first finished(ish) transit diagram.

Transit Maps says:

A great first effort here from Elliot! I’d say that its arguably more successful that the official SNCB/NMBS diagram, which is a pretty staid and old-fashioned thing. However, while the official diagram shows all the other rail modes in the greater Brussels area, Elliot’s version only shows the S-Train lines. This makes the diagram much cleaner, though perhaps at the expense of understanding how it fits into the complete transit picture.

Still, it’s a very confident and stylish piece with a great underlying grid and a lovely colour palette that I feel actually gives some subtle structure to the design. It seems to me that all the lines that run through the central spine of Gare du Midi to Gare du Nord are cooler colours – greens and blues – while cross-town lines that circumvent the centre tend to be warmer colours. I do also note that none of the line colours match the colours from the official diagram, so make of that what you will.

Visually, I really like the treatment of the terminus stations, though I do wonder whether their similarity to the fare zone boundaries could be potentially confusing to readers – are these stations in some sort of special fare zone? Speaking of the zone boundaries, I’d like to see these simplified down further, reducing their shapes to the purest form possible to echo the rigid simplicity of the route lines.

Overall, I think the labelling on the diagram itself is a bit small – the type in the legend is bigger than the type on the map, and I don’t think that’s ever a good result. Likewise, the line bullets could be larger to enable rapid identification of each line. The walking time labels definitely need to be quite a bit bigger; they’re almost unreadable at any distance from the diagram.

Our final word: Lovely, stylish and minimalistic design. Finding the balance between the diagram design and type size is always one of the trickiest parts of transit map design and this could use a bit of tweaking to get it just right. Still, this is an awesome first diagram – great work, Elliot!

Project: My UTA Rail and BRT Design Exploration

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I teased this in yesterday’s review of the new official UTA diagram, so here’s my exploration of a few design ideas for an alternative version. As always with this type of project, I look for ways to approach the design problems for the diagram that are intentionally different to the official one. We already know what those solutions look like, so I like to explore the untested and see what happens. Some things work really well, others perhaps not so much… so let’s take a look!

My design rules for this project were pretty simple: use the same canvas size (18″ x 29″, presumably the size of signage frames at UTA stations), the same line colours, the same font family (Whitney Condensed) and show all of the information that’s present on the official diagram.

As hinted at in yesterday’s post, my first action was to make the FontRunner line dead straight from Ogden down to Orem, becoming the strong vertical axis that the rest of the rest of the diagram is then composed around. This means that the light rail lines have to slide across to meet it, but I feel that the major interchange at Central Pointe station at least gives them a visual reason to do so. There’s no right or wrong answer here: in reality, all the rail lines parallel each other very closely through Salt Lake City – it’s only the diagram’s need to enlarge the free fare zone that artificially creates a gap between them that then needs to be closed before they actually interchange at Murray Central. The official diagram makes the FrontRunner line move over; I went with the other approach.

Speaking of Murray Central, I got rid of that god-awful little kink in the FrontRunner line there by simply retaining a small gap between it and the light rail lines and using a simple connecting line between them. In real life, passengers have to walk across a car park to get between the two parts of the station, so this seems to be both an easy and realistic solution. As this small gap between the lines now indicates some sort of physical proximity, I made the decision to flip the Blue Line out so that the South Jordan and Sandy Civic Center stations have some distance between them. The official diagram places them adjacent when it’s a 2-mile walk from one to the other… which is not the same as crossing a car park!

However, the biggest difference between my version and the official one is my treatment of the BRT lines. Instead of trying to use the same visual “scale” as the rest of the diagram and massively enlarging the area needed to show these routes in their entirety, I’ve instead used smaller, simplified representations of the lines on the main diagram and linked them to insets of strip maps showing all the stop names. It’s worth noting that these insets could also be enlarged diagrams or geographical maps of the routes, but I really didn’t feel like drawing them for this quick exercise (just being honest here!). The plus side of this is that the main diagram can be more “to scale” without the massive distortions that having to include the full BRT routes creates, although I’d still say that even these simple representations are still twice the size they should be if they were truly in-keeping with the relative scale of the outer portions of the map. The down side? Increased cognitive load for the end user as they have to relate the small map to the map or strip map in the inset. Simplicity is definitely a benefit of the official UTA approach, scale be damned!

Other points to note: all labels are set horizontally, even though my type point size is slightly larger and the area that the central portion of the diagram takes up is marginally smaller than on the official diagram. Seriously, it was so simple to do this that there’s really no excuse for the official version not to do it in the future.

I’ve bumped up the weight of all the labels – Book to Medium, and Regular to Bold – which I think makes a tremendous difference to the how solid and grounded the diagram feels. Lightweight, spindly type is not my aesthetic; I like things to be bolder and for my chosen weights to have some good visual contrast between them. I’ve also only used the Whitney Condensed family throughout instead of mixing thicknesses, which I feel helps to unify the look of the diagram.

The free fare zone is highlighted in yellow to draw the eye and also differentiate it from the three grey boxes around the edge of the map. The zone is also identified as such right on the map itself, obviating the need for readers to refer to a legend. Note also how all the labels for stations included in the zone are contained totally within the yellow area – removing any ambiguity about which stations are eligible for that sweet free trip.

All stations that interchange between light rail and FrontRunner now have bold labels, and the two station names for the North Temple/North Temple Bridge interchange have been consolidated into one because, quite frankly, that’s just ridiculous and made the labelling there so much more complex than it needed to be. I don’t mind which name gets used, but just pick one!

A stylistic choice – all the lines terminate either horizontally or vertically, never on a diagonal. It helps unify the design and allows the station name and line designation marker to always be close to the actual station marker, presenting information consistently throughout. The official diagram puts the labels and markers on one line with the marker furtherest away from the station dot – which means that sometimes the markers are a long, long way away from the place they’re meant to be providing information about!

And finally, a bit of whimsy: the locations where the light rail lines cross the FrontRunner lines are vertically accurate (i.e., the diagram properly shows which one goes under or over the other), and there’s a little “shadow” on the lower line to give an illusion of depth. Necessary? No. Fun to do? Absolutely.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! What works? What doesn’t? I’m pretty pleased with how this looks considering I didn’t spend a massive amount of time working on it, but I know it’s not a complete solution – just some ideas rattling around my head that show interesting alternative approaches to the ever-improving real thing.

Submission – New Official Map: UTA Rail and BRT Map, 2023

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Submitted by Browne, who says:

UTA, the primary transit provider for northern Utah, has officially launched its newest BRT service, and with it, a new transit map. The OGX is a new BRT route from Ogden Central Station, downtown, Weber State University, and down to McKay-Dee Hospital.

Besides the new BRT line, there are subtle changes to the map’s design as well, such as rounded corners, which had been angular in the previous design. I’m curious to know what you think about the representation of geographic scale between the various lines and how all mode types are presented with similar hierarchies.

Transit Maps says:

Perhaps a little surprisingly, we haven’t checked in with the UTA map since 2015, when it was just taking its first baby steps towards becoming something befitting a transit agency of its scope. I’m pleased to note that the improvement has continued since then and that this is now a more-than-decent effort – clean, simple, easy to read and in line with the agency’s corporate design standards. All to be applauded!

That’s not to say that there aren’t some issues, though – I still think that the weight of the labels (Whitney Condensed Book) are a little light and spindly, and the locality labels are so small and insignificant as to be barely noticed at all. These either have to be larger and bolder (though still a light grey) or dispensed with. When many of the outer stations bear the same name as the locality labels, you really do wonder whether they’re actually needed at all. There’s an uncomfortable mix of condensed and regular thicknesses of Whitney throughout – even though they’re technically the same font family, they don’t really work that well together – the legend looks particularly clumsy.

Some station names are set with angled type. These days, I normally let that go if – and only if – they’re all angled the same way, but there’s a lot of different orientations here. There’s some width left in the canvas, so it really shouldn’t be too hard to tweak things to allow for horizontal labels throughout.

The purple FrontRunner commuter rail line still takes a strange, wobbly path through the map and that little jog in-and-out at Murray Central makes my eye twitch. I personally see the FrontRunner as the central thematic “spine” of the entire system, and I’d love to see a version where it just runs straight down the centre of the map with no deviations at all (even at Murray Central!) until it gets down to Orem, where the inclusion of the UVX BRT necessitates a turn across to Provo [more on that version soon! – Cam, being a big tease].

Talking about the BRT brings us to Browne’s ideas of scale and mode representation. Let’s be honest: scale on a diagram like this is always going to be tricky – the FrontRunner commuter rail extends for some 88 miles, while the entirety of the light rail service area (while still extensive) is only 17 miles from north to south. That said, I feel there should be two clearly delineated scales on the map: the light rail area, and the areas outside that to the north and south. For example, the Draper FrontRunner station should line up horizontally with the Draper Town Center light rail stop, instead of being higher than it. Of course, this diagram’s hand is forced by the space needed to show the Orem–Provo BRT lines at the same level of detail as the rest of the map – this needs that bottom third of the space, so everything else gets forced upwards, and the space between Orem and Provo on the FrontRunner line gets massively enlarged as a result.

At least Orem and Provo form a “closed loop”, where the enlarged scale only affects those two stations. However, this “BRT scale” becomes more of a problem with the Ogden BRT line at the top of the diagram, where it looks like the line extends almost all the way back to Salt Lake City! In reality, the entire line is contained within Ogden, and the southern end of it is only about as far south as the Roy FrontRunner station. Other approaches to this problem could be thinner route lines and smaller labels for the BRT lines so they can be shrunk somewhat in relation to the main diagram; or generalised representations of the lines that are more to actual scale, perhaps supported by inset maps that label everything properly. Of course, this diagram does have a “not to scale” disclaimer, and the information is still easy to understand, so maybe it’s not even a massive problem for general use.

As for the representation of the different modes, the only one I have a problem with is the FrontRunner, which runs far less frequently that the other services and should be indicated as such instead of just lumping it in as “Rail” with other, more frequent services. Everything else is rapid transit with decent frequencies.

Our final word: Getting better! Tries its best at representing networks with vastly differing scales all on the same diagram, though the solution won’t please everyone. Still feels a little too “light” and ungrounded, like it’s floating on the canvas a bit.