Transit X Final

Craig Ackerman
1 / 7

  This is a comic about Transit X, a proposal to find a better form of transportation in Boston. The problem that I faced was that not many people knew about Transit X even though it could become a reality by 2018. The only resources to learn about this proposal were text heavy websites that take a long time to read and understand. With this project I came up with a comic that provides a way to gain a basic understanding of Transit X. The comic has enough text to give you an understanding of the major points in this proposal. The comic explains the current options, precidents of the proposal, the senate bill, proposed routes, techincal details, as well as pros and cons. The reason for this project is to create an easy way to inform the general public about this proposal.

      This comic starts on the first page with laying out the current options as well as real world examples of systems like Transit X. The second page gives a more indepth understanding of what Senate bill PRT 1837 is for and how Transit X relates to it. Page three shows the proposed routes for the system in a city setting and in a school setting. The next page shows the technical side of the pod system. I end the comic with a pros and cons page. 

Transit X: Beginning to End

Craig Ackerman
1 / 13

     This is a comic about Transit X, a proposal to find a better form of transportation in Boston. The problem that I faced was that not many people knew about Transit X even though it could become a reality by 2018. The only resources to learn about this proposal were text heavy websites that take a long time to read and understand. With this project I came up with a comic that provides a way to gain a basic understanding of Transit X. The comic has enough text to give you an understanding of the major points in this proposal. The comic explains the current options, precidents of the proposal, the senate bill, proposed routes, techincal details, as well as pros and cons. The reason for this project is to create an easy way to inform the general public about this proposal.

      This comic starts on the first page with laying out the current options as well as real world examples of systems like Transit X. The second page gives a more indepth understanding of what Senate bill PRT 1837 is for and how Transit X relates to it. Page three shows the proposed routes for the system in a city setting and in a school setting. The next page shows the technical side of the pod system. I end the comic with a pros and cons page. 

     The project started with reasearch. I learned about Jpods, which is the system that would be used. I learned about the senate bill's propsed problem, and how Transit X fixes it. The next step was to start drawing concept images and page layouts. I started with two concept images. One of the system on a Boston street and the other of a pods station in front of Fenway Park. Then I created page layouts and a script. I combined the script into the layout and drew preliminary drawings to create the rough draft. To make the final draft I started with the panel layout. I would draw the lines lightly across the page to map out where each panel could fit. Once I found a layout that would work, I would erase the uneeded lines. To layout the text I would first line the text box and then write the text lightly. After that all I needed to do was draw in the pictures and go over the needed lines with a pen. Throughout this project most of the problems that I faced dealt with the panel layout. I would need to draw lines over and over again because the lines needed to be both straight and in the right position, so it dealt with a lot of calculations to make the panels fit.

     The first iteration or rough draft of the comic was made up of finalized drawings and text, but without the final page layouts. The pages were very loose and were drawn freely without rulers and such, but it gave the general look of the page. In the second iteration, I finalized the panels with a ruler. I also changed the text to flow better in the comic. The biggest change was to add a concluding paragraph at the end of the comic. I wrote about the potential future of the proposal. The drawings didn't change, so I just drew the same drawings to the final draft. Though in this draft, I traced the actual maps onto the page.  In the final draft, I also went over it in ink and cleaned it up in photoshop.