Toronto Live Map · Design story

The design story: drawing Toronto in wood

Thirteen versions in nine days. This is how the Toronto Live Map became a piece of wall art: what we kept, what we left out, and why the lake is drawn the way it is.

It started with a question

The shoreline. The islands. The ravines.

What if the city we move through every day could hang on the wall as art? Something between a transit map and a drawing: warm, quiet, and unmistakably Toronto.

So we drew the real city. The subway lines follow their real paths across Toronto, traced from open map data. The shoreline is the real shoreline. Toronto's odd, lovable shape is all there.

Thirteen versions in nine days

The first version was a sketch: lines, a lake, and a dot for every station. It looked like a map. Now it had to feel like Toronto.

Each version after that answered one question.

1. Finer lines. Thick lines shout. Thin lines let the wood show through.
2. A name for the lake. "Lake Ontario", in italic capitals, in the lower right.
3. Room for every station. A frame around the map, and stations spaced so that each one has its own small circle.
4. A title. TORONTO LIVE MAP, across the top, in a bold serif.
5. The neighbourhoods. The hardest part. More on that below.
6. The right lettering. One family of letters for everything, in different weights.
7. Parks and ravines. The green spaces, drawn as the finest hatching on the board.
8. A maple leaf that moved. It started in the lake. It ended by the compass.
9. A signature. Our maker's mark, set into a break in the frame, like a name at the bottom of a print.

Which neighbourhoods made the cut

Toronto has well over a hundred neighbourhoods. A 20 × 16 inch board has room for about twenty names before it turns into a phone book.

So we drew the map in three voices.

• The big names, in italic: North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, East York, York, and Downtown down by the lake. Vaughan and Markham sit at the top edge, where the lines run out of the city.
• The places people say out loud, in small spaced capitals: Downsview, Willowdale, Midtown, Don Mills, High Park, The Danforth, Leslieville, The Beaches, Weston and Rexdale.
• The water: the Toronto Islands, the Humber River and the Don River.

Did we leave out your neighbourhood? Probably. That is the one argument every Toronto map starts. But look closer: your station is there, with its own light.

Why the lake ripples

On most maps, the lake is a flat blue shape. On wood, a flat shape is just an empty patch.

So we drew Lake Ontario as rings of contour lines, following the shoreline outward, the way ripples move away from a dropped stone. Up close they look like the grain of the wood. From across the room they look like water. In the photo above you can see them wrap around the Leslie Street Spit.

Four tones of engraving

The whole map is one colour: the warm brown of engraved wood. The depth comes from how dark each part is engraved.

• Darkest: the subway lines, the frame and the title. They carry the map.
• Medium: the big names, like North York and Scarborough.
• Light: the neighbourhoods and the rivers.
• Faintest: the parks and ravines, a fine 45-degree hatching that you notice only when you step closer.

That is why the map reads calmly from the sofa, and keeps rewarding you when you stand in front of it.

The lettering

We chose one family of letters, Fraunces, a soft serif with a little old-world warmth. Bold capitals for the title. Italic for the big names and the water. Small, widely spaced capitals for the neighbourhoods. One family keeps the map calm. The different weights keep it readable.

The compass corner

Every good map has a corner where it explains itself. Ours sits in the bottom left, below Etobicoke: a compass rose with a natural maple leaf above it, the legend "Lines 1 2 4 5 6", and a small scale bar from 0 to 2 km.

The scale bar says "downtown scale" for a reason. To fit the whole city on one board and still give every downtown station room to breathe, downtown is drawn at true scale and the suburbs are gently squeezed towards it. A few stations were nudged apart too, so that no two lights crowd each other. Honest maps tell you when they do that.

Then, a light in every station

Only when the drawing was finished did we add the light. Behind each of the 108 stations sits one small light, set into the wood. By day you see a quiet engraving. By night you see the city move.

How the lights know when a train arrives is its own story: read how it works.

Where it is made

Natural wood, engraved and set in a real wood frame. The frame and some finishing details may still change before production.

Designed in Toronto.

Keep exploring

• Toronto Live MapThe engraved wooden map that glows as trains arrive, and the VIP reservation.
• How it worksOpen data, every 20 seconds, and what lights when.
• Gifts for someone who loves TorontoOur 2026 guide, for every kind of Torontonian.
• The Toronto subway mapThe five lines on the map, station by station.
• Toronto wall artChoosing, sizing and hanging map art.
• Toronto subway historyFrom one line in 1954 to five today.