Secret Ingredients of Building Iconic Design

Steve Jobs once mentioned, "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." He also mentioned if he had asked about how anyone would want a new MP3 player to look like, all would have answered a better version of Walkman."

People in London or visited London would have heard this name Henry Charles Beck and all over the world still uses his idea - as a matter of fact, his design got voted as the second most favorite British design after Concorde (turbojet-powered supersonic airliner - making cost ￡1.3 billion)

In 1863, the London Underground railway started the world-first Metropolitan Line. In the 1920s, eight different railways merged to create a single system and needed a map to represent so people would know where to ride. The map designed had rivers, water bodies, parks, and stations all crammed together at the center of the map. 

It had supreme accuracy showing streets with above-ground streets and intersections imposed on top, for a bird with x-ray vision, its remarkably accurate representation.

In 1931, Beck began replacing this complicated mess of spaghetti and simplified the map with the following principles:

• Commuters don't need to know or care about what lay above ground & all they care is to get from one station in the network to another. Focus on your customer need
• Replaced existing sinuous curves with straight lines — horizontals, verticals, and 45-degree angles. Make it Simple
• Depicted connections between stations without any scale and spaced the stations equally. Every station color corresponds to the color of the line. Think Different

Like any other idea, not all authorities accepted on the concept and skeptical that the map is too radical, but eventually agreed to print as pocket form in 1933.

Iconic Tube map was born and became a super hit with the public and is in use to date for 87+ years. It was one of the design's greatest triumphs. Over the decades, there were some improvisations, but the blueprint remained the same.

It's a demonstration of one's ingenuity, observing a problem and building a solution for it, rather than a response to public demand.