By David Topping

“When I saw the January Adult [Metro]pass,” artist Valentine Makhouleen wrote on his blog on Monday, “it reminded me of everything that is miserable about January in Toronto—gray skies, traffic on St. Clair, packed streetcars, unbearable cold and hospital pajamas. This mood is further reinforced by TTC through inconsistent type, bold borders, hideous out-of-place patterns, lack of a balanced grid and inconsistent spelling.” The current passes, he wrote, lack “personality.”
We don’t really need to tell you what happens next—Makhouleen made twelve new Metropass mockups of his own, one for each month of this year, and each one featuring a new area of the city, because, he wrote, “I tried to think about what TTC stands for (aside from fare hikes and recent crime) and what the pass gets you.”
The passes are only mockups; Makhouleen began them, he told Torontoist, as a “personal project,” and all but one of the background photos were shamefully cobbled together from around the internet without permission from their photographers, though Makhouleen is adamant that once the weather clears he’ll hop on the TTC and take some shots himself. For now, then, the passes are “merely a finger pointing in the right direction,” he wrote, and “maybe someone at TTC will read this and try to inject some life into the $109 piece of plastic.”
The passes, designed by (and courtesy of) Makhouleen, are above.