Maps are one of the most basic data visualizations that we have; we've been making them for millennia. But we still haven't perfected them as a tool for understanding complex systems — and with 26 lines and 468 stations across five boroughs, the New York City subway system certainly is complex. The KickMap is the result of my quest to design a more effective subway map, and ultimately to encourage increased ridership.

Two days ago Improv Everywhere, New York City-based culture jammers founded by Upright Citizens Brigade’s Charlie Todd, released this glorious contribution to subway theater.

Almost 1.7 million views, laughs, knowing nods and appreciative forwards later, it’s still going strong.

Star Wars Subway car is one of Improv Everywhere’s hundred or so “missions,” many of which you can watch over at the group’s blog.

For our latest mission, we staged a reenactment of the first Princess Leia / Darth Vader scene from Star Wars on a New York City subway car. The white walls and sliding doors on the train reminded us of the rebel ship from the movie, and we thought it would be fun to see how people would react to a surprise appearance by the iconic characters. We spread out the actors along the train line, staging it so they would enter the right car at the right time.

Star Wars and Princess Leia aside, the joy in this theater is the focus they give to passenger reactions as the scene unfolds.

Big kudos from this side of the Internets.

About Princess Leia Apprehended on Subway

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

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I started playing with Issuu to see what it can and could do. It’s basically a PDF Reader on steroids. If you click the “full screen” icon above, you’ll see what I mean.

I’m testing it out here with photos from a project I began last September called Subway.

The layout of the images was handled with Apple’s iPhoto. Basically, you can create “books” with your photos, so I did. Then I went to print it as a PDF, saved and uploaded, and what you have above is the result. Pretty cool.

By comparison, here’s what Flickr does with the same content. It’s a little bit of an apple and robots comparison though because Flickr is just showing us the images. They aren’t laid out like in the PDF.

Now, why actual publications are using Issuu is a bit confusing. It’s not intuitive, doesn’t lead to further content exploration and basically blows aside from the cool factor of having flippy pages.

Or put another way, I think it works well for graphics and images but if you visit Issuu and start exploring, you’ll see a number of magazines that are are print heavy using the platform. Unfortunately, these text heavy publications just don’t work on the platform. It becomes an interface pain in the yahoodle as you zoom in, out and over to read things.

My intuition is that designers are pushing organizations towards it because they can maintain their layouts. But as far as usability goes, this isn’t what we should be focusing on.

Instead, it’s a neat trick to play with our friends and family.