Building the Periodic Table of FTR.

Fares, ticketing and retail is a sprawl — products, channels, technologies, the authorities and operators who run it, the suppliers who build it, the payment rails underneath. I wondered, half as a joke, whether the whole thing would sit inside the one visual metaphor everyone already knows: the periodic table. So I tried it.

01I let AI do the legwork

The hard part of a map like this isn't drawing it — it's deciding what goes in it. So I pointed AI at the question: which products, channels, technologies, authorities, operators, suppliers and payment rails actually make up UK FTR, and how do they group? It did the research, drafted the element list, sorted them into families and proposed the layout.

Then I did the part that's actually mine: I checked it, argued with it, cut the wrong calls and added the ones it missed. The judgement stayed with me; the legwork didn't.

02It borrowed everything it could

I didn't start from a blank page. The Ionic brand, the "Charged" look, the self-hosted fonts, and the site it would live on all already existed. So the table didn't need designing from scratch — it just borrowed the identity wholesale and appeared, interactive, on the same site, looking like it had always belonged there.

03Idea to live, same afternoon

Because the research wasn't mine to do by hand and the design was already done, the gap between "wouldn't it be funny if…" and a published, tappable page on my own site collapsed to a single sitting. That's the whole point of an AI-first way of working: producing the thing becomes the cheap part, so an idle idea can actually get made.

None of this was a client brief. It was a bit of fun — a small test of what's possible when you already have the pieces and a workflow that treats the typing, not the thinking, as the easy bit.