The curious case of Microsoft’s Metro, a design language that cannot be spoken
Microsoft’s Metro design language has gone through a name change of late. Used to describe the company’s design principles around typography and minimal graphics, Metro is now referred to as the “Microsoft design language.”
More companies should put focus on systems of design like this. Simply put, these are the new highways and mass-transit systems, and we need to treat them that way.
The fire department says 55 passengers are being removed from the train. They are being led away from a fan shaft exit at 29th Avenue and Ager Road.
The train derailed near the west Hyattsville, Md. station, which is not far from the area where the deadly 2009 Metro crash took place.
UPDATE: WMATA has cancelled all weekend track work as a result of the derailment, and says that overground trains will travel at slower speeds this weekend as a precautionary measure. There’s also a baseball game tonight; WMATA also recommends riders take the Orange Line and Blue Lines to reach Nationals Park, rather than the Green Line.
Today in stories which would’ve made good “Seinfeld” plots back in 1994.
Stealing to gamble: Two DC-area Metro workers have been arrested, accused of a scheme to steal coins from fare machines and spend them on lottery tickets. Federal prosecutors allege the duo, John Haile and Horace McDade, defrauded the machines while on shift together; the investigation was launched after a source reported that Haile would regularly buy lottery tickets using bags of $500 or so, all in coins. Is it that hard to find a Coinstar, man? Haile’s records, and this is the crazy part, show $150,000 in unexplained income since 2008. As lottery officials told the authorities, to secure even just the winnings confirmed to them, he had to have been buying “an extraordinary amount of tickets.” (Photo by Eric Fisher) source
For the handful of sites that won’t really work for due to legacy ActiveX controls, there will be a desktop-style browser available as a backup. Thinking about it a little bit, this is a poor handling of this situation if you ask us, because Microsoft runs a highly-used plugin of its own — Silverlight, which drives the Netflix Web app. Sure, Flash needs to die, but is Microsoft in a position to unilaterally make this decision?
A valid point by CopyEditor that should be kept in mind when reading this article. (P.S. CopyEditor runs a great Tumblr.)
A classic design gets a refresh: Nearly 40 years ago, graphic designer Lance Wyman designed a map that’s come to define a city. The result — a map of a fairly self-contained Metro system — has survived numerous station changes and many iterations to remain a truly useful piece of work. With upcoming changes to the Metro system that will make the map significantly more complicated, Wyman’s getting another chance to work on the design, which needs room for Dulles Airport, a new color and a ton of names that have gotten unwieldy over the years (see “U Street/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo”). And people are clamoring for a redesign — seriously, check out this contest right here. If you’re wondering if the 73-year-old Wyman is getting nervous about all this, the answer is yes. This is his ‘68 Comeback Special here. (photo by The Washington Post’s Jennifer S. Altman; see a gallery here) source
Scary Surveillance Footage of the Day: Washington Metro has released security footage from a major escalator malfunction which occurred on Oct. 30th — the day of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear — when a downward escalator suddenly sped up, resulting several injured riders.
“Initially the reaction was oh good we’re moving faster,” escalator rider Peyton Robertson told Fox 5 News. “Then in about a split second I realized that’s not good. This escalator’s out of control and we were hurtling towards the bottom.”
Metro blamed the incident on “a failure of the braking system to stop when the over-speed safety switch activated.”
*shudder* This is why now, we elevate.
» To put it in perspective: The rally had the highest Saturday ridership ever – passing the record set in June 1991, when a rally was held for Operation Desert Storm. That rally gave Metro around 786,358 trips that day. And assuming the riders went round-trip yesterday, that means 237,719 extra riders were on the Metro yesterday. That doesn’t mean 237,719 extra people – the tally doesn’t account for multiple trips by the same rider – but suffice it to say that the crowd was really huge yesterday. And no, the Beck rally (which also took place on a Saturday) didn’t even rate in the top five (which is what we know you were really wondering).
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