Rebranded just “Nicollet” as opposed to the old “Nicollet Mall”, the pedestrian-and-transit street in downtown Minneapolis had its first major makeover in nearly 50 years, reopening in early 2019. I was asked by the Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District to design the maps for these “totems” (I keep wanting to call them kiosks, but fine). The design guidelines, especially around color use, was very tight: I basically had specified gray, yellow, red and green to work with (and green was a concession). The maps had to work both in daylight and backlit, and as you can see, the visual effect ends up being a little different between the two. What’s shown here is the original design from early 2018. A revamp in 2019, shown further below, included a little more color and thus had room to add the downtown skyway system in.