The project of a Boulder-based design duo, Simple Cycling Maps brings an impressive level of data, clarity, and art to their printed maps. In an age of high-resolution GPS head units and mindless turn-by-turn cues, Simple Cycling Maps hope their maps can bring something different to cycling navigation. Read on for Hailey Moore‘s Simple Cycling Maps Shop Visit and chat with the founders.
Nearly one hundred years ago, the English electrical draftsman Harry Beck designed a new Tube map for the London Underground system. If you’re now picturing a diagram reminiscent of a circuit board — composed of straight lines that meet at neat angles, accented with filled in circles to denote different stops, and color-coded according to the various subway lines — that’s proof enough of the enduring impact of Beck’s design. However, at the time of his original drawing in 1933, the ultra-simplistic rendering was almost deemed too radical by the publicity department to print for widespread use. The beauty and innovation of Beck’s design lay in what he chose to keep and, alternately, what he chose to chuck. By omitting any of London’s geographic markers like the River Thames and largely removing any of the real-life contours in the Tube lines, he designed a map that reflected more accurately — albeit abstractly — commuters’ thought processes when they descended to the subterranean rail lines: how do I most efficiently travel from point A to point B?
Beck’s design was, of course, ultimately printed and to great success, although he was never publicly credited for it in his lifetime (and was paid just over what would amount to $300 today). The simplified structure has been adapted to subway systems across the world, from New York, to Paris, and Tokyo. And, more recently, the Beck inspiration has infiltrated into a different sect of commuters: cyclists.
Simple Cycling Maps’ co-founders Zach and Michelle Lee have long been enmeshed in the design world, and bikes have been a simultaneous throughline in their history. The pair met while working at Communication Arts Inc., an Eames school spinoff based in Boulder, Colorado. When they met, the duo were fittingly part of a team working on a bike park and eco-tourism destination in Belgium, a project internally termed Velocity.
A career graphic designer, Zach’s background is in wayfinding and signage design. Being versed in transit-centered vocabulary comes with the territory. As an architectural designer, Michelle’s career has focused on how people interact with spaces. Both value solutions-oriented designs that present information to users in crisp, distilled fashion.
Inspired by Beck’s London Underground map, Zach began work on a personal side project in 2014, an attempt to make a Beck-styled rendering of the city of Boulder, but through the lens of a cyclist. “What’s beautiful about Harry Beck’s London Underground map — what was revolutionary — was that he used that schematic engineering style,” Zach told me on a recent trip to his and Michelle’s downtown Boulder studio. “And it totally makes sense when you’re designing a subway map, because you don’t really care about what happens in between: you know where you’re starting from and your final destination and that’s how you navigate. For cyclists, it’s different. You get to these points where you need to make a decision.”
In order to strike a balance between Beck’s uncluttered, high-level rendering of an area as a whole, while still providing enough relevant detail for bike-level navigation, Zach created a Boulder System Map that feels uniquely tailored to cyclists. Perhaps the most striking liberty Zach took with the design was in orienting the top of the map with the direction West, in line with Boulder’s iconic craggy skyline. “I like to climb, and all of the climbs start with riding west,” said Zach, laughing, by way of justification.
While the map still largely relies on Beck’s straight-line depiction for main navigational arteries, the map uses a code to illustrate surface type (solid is pavement, dotted is smooth gravel, and the infrequent thinner, wavy lines indicate trails). Zach also added altitude markers to communicate elevation change for various climbs and, for color-coding, he borrowed the green-to-blue-to-black-to-red scale used on Nordic ski trails to indicate difficulty.
To say that Zach and Michelle are perfectionists might be underselling, but also oversimplifying, their approach. That initial Boulder System Map underwent 38 iterations from the time of Zach’s first conceptual stab in 2014 to the first publicly available edition was released in 2016. (And, of course, since cities are ever-evolving landscapes, it has since been updated further.)
Both Zach and Michelle still have full-time careers in their respective design fields which might slow down the pace of Simple Cycling Maps production, but, put differently, it also means that they can take as long as they’d like for each new project. Even so, the brand has seen success, through partnerships with Specialized, Skratch Labs, and Rapha. For now, at least, Simple Cycling Maps remains a side gig that the couple use as a vehicle for discovery of and meditation on place and they seem to be content with the amount of creative freedom that comes with that.
Since the creation of that first System Map concept, Simple Cycling Maps has used this design lens to render the Santa Monica Mountains outside Los Angeles, starting the project in 2020 with local rider and engineer Cory Pomerantz to dial in the iterations before landing on the final version last year. But Zach has also continued to play with scale and scope, creating what he dubs the Ride Series design that offers a more granular, up-close view of high-traffic trail networks, or popular local riding areas, as well as (my personal favorite) the Profile Series.
Zach flipping through some of the maps he turns to for inspiration.
The Profile Series is another indication of Zach’s love for climbing on the bike and, while visually striking, is also designed with equal parts aspirational and functional purposes. The Profile Series format takes the elevation profiles for all of the most notable climbs in an area (in Boulder, there are 25, in the Santa Monica Mountains, 29) and stacks them on top of one another, all at the same scale. That last part is key; Zach said that part of the motivation behind the Profile Series was to create a more “true” or understandable portrayal of local climbs, because when shown on apps like Strava or Ride With GPS, the profile of a specific route is often stretched to fit a screen size, thereby distorting the steepness of the terrain.
But, in creating the Profile Series format, he was also motivated to give newer cyclists points of reference and he hopes that being able to visually compare climbs might help riders start ticking them off progressively. Michelle told me that she was an early beneficiary of this and that it was helpful to set her expectations when going into a new-to-her climb (“Ok, this will be like two NCARs stacked on top of each other.”). In addition to depicting surface type, road junctions, and a detailed gradient breakdown, Zach includes the last mile (or kilometer) marker that cyclists will see before they reach the top of a specific climb—a number that might turn into a carrot or a mantra to keep them going (“just hang on until 55.”).
Both of the Boulder and Santa Monica Profile Series are printed on bold black backgrounds with the profiles cutting clean white lines of relief. But, in a pretty drastic aesthetic shift, Simple Cycling Maps’ Mallorca Profile Series takes the concept in a different direction. “That’s Michelle’s influence,” said Zach of the Mediterranean palette that colors the climbs, arranged here as a grid of tiles, with an overview of the small island in the bottom right corner. The result is a Profile Series that feels more like a collection of moments, rather than a pure numbers comparison — snapshots in an album, or stamped pages in a passport.
The couple decided on the alternative treatment for the Mallorca Profile Series after visiting the Spanish island three times on cycling-inspired vacations. As Michelle told me, “the beauty of being there, the different terrain, the smell in the air, the culture” just makes the riding “feel different,” and the roads are some of the best-maintained they’ve ever encountered, with buttery smooth pavement and leveled-out switchbacks. In addition to crafting the Mallorca Profile Series graphic, the couple also designed a matching jersey to commemorate one of their favorite cycling destinations.
This idea of distilling memories in maps is the inspiration behind Simple Cycling Maps unique Climb Compare series too, where riders can see how their local backyard testpiece stacks up to the classic cols of World Tour races. A current example on the site compares two Italian icons, the Cipressa and the Poggio, with Boulder’s backyard Flagstaff Mountain, but riders can also request customized Climb Compares that juxtapose a destination climb that they might only ever get to ride once with their weekly training ride.
“We get a lot of people who like to relive their memories, with a Compare or the Profile series,” said Zach. “It is a lot more artful and a visual tool, but it’s not trying to replace navigation.” The topic of how Zach and Michelle see the place of Simple Cycling Map’s pocket-sized paper maps in the context of today’s widespread GPS navigation technology was one I was keen to discuss.
“It is a relationship; we view it as macro — our maps — and micro, which is the head unit on your bike, to give you the turn-by-turn directions and the exact curve in the road,” said Zach. “But our map is the thing you can pull out when you stop and see the overall area and it gives you that high-level view” that can be difficult to see on a small screen. Michelle was quick to add that the couple use both and that Simple Cycling Maps is toying with the idea of some kind of digital interface, though they don’t want to pit themselves against GPS giants like Strava, Komoot, or Ride With GPS. For them, the navigation has to be clear but it is not the only factor to consider; the only way they could see going digital is if they could find a way to provide something different to riders. In the meantime, the actual paper maps aren’t going anywhere.
The idea of pulling out a paper map mid-ride feels, to me, about as radical as Harry Beck’s original Tube map design must have initially seemed to the people of London. And, although I don’t see myself shifting away from using a head unit or canceling my Ride With GPS subscription any time soon, there’s also a certain comfort I feel in being able to see an area’s roads or climbs rendered in total on a printed page, whether in the form of one of Simple Cycling Map’s pocket-sized maps, or large-format wall hangings, no pinch-to-zoom required. Because the craft that Zach and Michelle bring to their navigation designs elevate the roads and climbs shown beyond just the pure numbers which, in turn, illustrates the secret behind the best rides: the best rides are about more than just tracing the lines on the map.