Maps: Cartography & Typography
This is a collection of maps I've designed since 2000. In my maps, I explore everything from the editorial nature of maps to the role of typography in communicating the spirit (or politics) of place. I started out trying to make maps that appear more traditional. These are made out of a love of maps and as a way to learn from the many amazing cartographers that came before me. I typically make these as a record of a place I've visited or as a present for friends. Most of these eventually get printed and framed so paper is the intended medium.

The other style I am trying to develop is more original and contemporary. Many years ago, when I was preparing a map of Manahttan to be silk screened, I noticed that the typography layer was enough to capture the essence of the city... the fabric of the streets and its relationship to the surrounding water and landmarks. I made a few experiments at the time and then forgot about them until a couple of years ago. The Silk Road was my first attempt at exploring these ideas further. The maps in this series are intended to be art experiments with typography.

Maps are a very interesting media type. They exist somewhere between images that we look at and documents that we read. Their reference to the real world often hides their subjective, if not political, nature. A couple of friends have commented, "What's left to be mapped?". It may simply be the perspective of an insider but I think there is so much more to map... if only to see the same places with new eyes.

I've included fairly detailed descriptions of the inspiration or objective of each map. I am very interested in getting people's reactions to the maps so please comment. I've adjusted the post dates of my blog to the approximate creation dates of my maps so please click on the archive links on the right. There are a total of about 10 or 12 maps. More to come.

Maps Overview
Click on the map titles below each map to see a larger version and its description.

The Silk Road


The Aleutian Islands


Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa


Block Island, RI


Point Reyes National Seashore


The Town of Kensico NY


Fire Island, NY


South Island, New Zealand


The Diomede Islands

Map of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa
This map is another trip / journey map. In June of 2007, my wife and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with 12 other people. It was a major undertaking and accomplishment for us so when we got back, I immediately started a map of our trip. There are 3 or 4 major routes up the mountain so I wanted to understand our route relative to the others. People often ask me what map did I use as a base map. I have scans of all of my base maps and my finished maps usually bare little resemblance to my source maps. For my Kilimanjaro Map, I relied on a very cheap and poor tourist map that I bought at a hotel gift shop, some aerial photographs and a few map details that I found on the Internet. The trickiest part was figuring out how to render the mountain which is really a large cinder cone sitting on top of a giant volcanic dome. The dome appears quite smooth and regular from a distance so after several attempts at rendering more detail, I settled on some very simple blends and shading. I realized I could use the same technique to create an elevation view of the mountain so I added that in which gives a better sense of the scale of the mountain. In addition to the summit peak itself, there were two other major geographic features along our journey, Cathedral Spires and Mwenzi Peak. Seeing them in both the map and the elevation makes it easier to understand the various summit routes. There were also key landmarks on our journey so capturing them on the map was key. The map documents not just our route but dates and campsites as well as a few minor details such as the route taken by one of our climbers who got sick and had to hike out on Day 4. The cartouche contains a slightly personalized description of the mountain in the fine type. I also created a decorative border for this map based on a traditional African pattern... something I might try more of in future maps. If any of you are planning to climb the mountain and want more details, please feel free to contact me.

Map of Block Island, Rhode Island
This map is in the same series as my map of Fire Island. Its more traditional in appearance and was done for a friend. Block Island lies off the coast of Rhode Island in the Atlantic Ocean. It was once a whaling outpost and is now a popular Summer destination for the Boston and New York City communities. An interesting but little known fact about the island is that they chose to remain independent during the Revolutionary War. They knew they were part of the 13 colonies but wanted to continue their trade relationship with England so they tried to stay neutral. My friend Rob loves going to Block Island with his family and his daughter Maya. So, last year I decided to create a map of the island for his birthday. It is a fairly inclusive map but I emphasized a few of his favorite haunts on the island to make it more personal. The cartouche contains a short history of the island that ends with a description of its Summer popularity with, "New York Type 'A' Wall Street financial types"... a description that could be used to describe Rob.

Sakhalin... a Long Island with a Long Story
I have always admired the artistry of older maps. The edges of these maps often contain engravings depicting local architecture or the real or imagined cosmos. One of the elements of traditional map making is the cartouche. Cartouches typically contain the name of the map along with other pertinent information like the date of the map and the name of the map maker. But some old maps turn the name into a short, visually elegant narrative of the place being mapped. If the maps were meant to be as accurate as possible, the cartouche is the one place where the map maker can show their creative side creating custom fonts and flourishes.

I try to spend some time on the cartouche whenever I am creating a map. At first, I tried to mimic some of the typographic flourishes. But recently, I have also started to explore the narrative side of cartouches... to use the cartouche to summarize what is interesting about a place. In my map of Sakhalin, I have tried to take this to it's ultimate end by making the cartouche overtake the map in importance.

The Island of Sakhalin lies North of Hokkaido, the northern-most island of Japan and East of mainland Russia. Overall the island is of limited interest. There is some oil but the climate is not great and there are no major cities. Despite the seaming lack of commercial interest, the island has been the subject of ongoing land disputes. It has a native population but was colonized by China, Japan and eventually Russia. In the 20th century, the island switched hands between Russia and Japan. A post-World War II treaty gave possession to Russia... the legitimacy of which is still disputed by Japan today. In researching the history of the island, I came upon a description in Wikipedia. Wikipedia summaries are particularly interesting in how much they pack into a paragraph or two usually with no one political or commercial agenda. The description also contains the name of the island in Chinese, Russian and Japanese so I decided that I would use these in my cartouche. The map is a "political" map in that the cartouche describes not only the evolving disputes over the island but the evolution of the name of the place in the various languages of its "owners". To highlight the dominance of the cartouche narrative and hint at the lack of interesting landmarks of the island, I left the map itself devoid of detail. The Island is surrounded by several bodies of water, several of which also have have multiple names given over the history of the island's discovery and history.

Map of the South Island, New Zealand
This map of the South Island in New Zealand is a record of an outdoor adventure my wife and I took with Active New Zealand a couple of years ago. Like the map of Mt. Kilimanjaro that follows and the map of Yosemite that I am still working on, it records a journey as much as a place. I was also motivated to work on them because I shared the journey with others and so the map is of interest to at least a small group of people. I have dreams of creating a map of my journey down the Colorado River but that is also a difficult task as the river's path seems minuscule in relation to the Canyon when seen on a map.It is also hard to capture the drama of the canyon without the benefit of photographs, 3D modeling or some wicked water color skills. But I digress. One of the questions I've been asked when I tell people I design maps is, What is there left to map? Hasn't everything already been mapped? I map lover would never ask this question. There are only 2 types of maps... boring ones and interesting ones and as long as you can map something interesting that is different than what's been mapped before, then there are more maps to be made. One way to achieve this is to map an observation that no one has made before. Another way is to focus not on the place but someone's unique journey through it. It is the difference between a map of Dallas and a map of President Kennedy's path through downtown the day he was shot. Minor details like the Grassy Knoll or the School Book Depository take on great meaning that would otherwise have been irrelevant and overlooked on any other map. Though lacking any of the historical importance, this is what I try to capture on my journey maps. On the New Zealand trip, we stopped at several common places, the Milford Sound, Mt. Aspiring, Queenstown, etc. But there were some special moments, the drive around Lake Wakatipu at sunrise, the place our bus broke down, and our bike ride through the Egglington Valley that made our trip unique to us. Flickr now offers the ability to place your images on a map. Both Yahoo and Google offer the ability to create custom maps. These tools increase the social and personal value of the Web. I am trying to do the same thing... just on the medium of paper and at a much smaller group size.

Typography-only detail of Point Reyes Map
This is a quick test I made of the Point Reyes Map using only the typography to show the geographic details.

Map of Tomales Bay and Point Reyes, CA
This is one of my more traditional maps but there is still a point of view on this map. Point Reyes and the adjoining Tomales Bay is one of our favorite places to visit outside of San Francisco. We have hiked Point Reyes and kayaked Tomales Bay extensively and love spending time there. I wanted to create a fairly straight forward map of the area to use in showing friends where to go when they were planning a visit. So the map contains the major landmarks like the Point Reyes Lighthouse but it also contains personal destinations like Tamalsaka Kayaks near the town of Marshal and a cottage on the bay that we enjoy renting. The key difference between this map and other maps of the are is the map's orientation. The map is oriented so the West is closer to the vertical rather than the traditional North. I did this because it is closer to your actual experience of the place. The general orientation of the California coast is North South. But in fact it weaves in and out so that, in some places (like Ventura, CA) the orientation is completely East/West and sailing off the coast takes you due South. But even there, the feeling is that you are heading West, out into the Pacific. It is the same with Point Reyes. One way to get to Point Reyes is via Highway 1. Here again, your impression when driving the highway is that you are mostly heading North or South with the Pacific Ocean always by your side. As it nears Point Reyes, Highway 1 also follows the San Andreas Fault and the fault is key to what makes Point Reyes unique. Point Reyes is actually part of the Pacific Tectonic Plate while land on the otherside of the fault is part of the North American Plate. As the two plates grind past each other, Point Reyes moves North. The land mass moved 16 feet North almost instantly in the famous 1906 Earthquake. When I heard this, it made me think of Point Reyes as this land mass sticking out into the Pacific and slowly sliding vertically up the California coast. In order to communicate this in the map, I rotated the source map until Tomales Bay was nearly vertical and then started re-drawing it.

The (not so) Straits of Magellan
This is a work in progress. I'm not happy at all with the cartouche. I think I threw it together to create a quick snapshot of what I was working on. I definitely have to revisit this one. Two things got me interested in doing this map. The first was just the labyrinth-like path the Straits of Magellan follow. I'm sure today you just punch in some GPS coordinates and you're done but what did it take for Magellan's navigator to find the correct path from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean? I've never read an account but I wonder if he took many wrong routes prior to finding the correct one. There are several places where the larger opening leads to a dead end. The other interesting aspect of this part of the World is the amazing number of islands that make up the Southern tip of South America. The pattern of islands starts to look like a hand print. It is also interesting to note the border between Chile and Argentina. Both Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego exist in both countries. And Argentina's border takes several jogs as if to keep giving Chile just a little more room. I think these islands are not very hospitable place to be so the fact that the border passes on this side of Island number 2037 and not the other side seems somewhat arbitrary to me. But then, if governments didn't take their borders so seriously, map making wouldn't be so interesting.

Diomede Islands Dichotomy
I stumbled unto these islands while making the Aleutian Island Maps. The Diomede Islands sit in between Russia and the United States in the middle of the Bering Sea. They are quite peculiar and full of cartographic dichotomies. Their remoteness and lack of economic or strategic value is in sharp contrast with where they sit geo-politically. There are two islands... Big Diomede Island and Little Diomede Island. One is Russian, one is American. North of the Islands lies the Chukchi Sea while south is the Bering Sea. Though clearly related geologically, they are split by the politically-decided International Dateline. This means that it is always one day on Little Diomede Island and a day later on Big Diomede Island.

What I wanted to communicate on this map is the amazing amount of political, man-made attributes that define these islands that are otherwise of almost no interest to anyone. I also wanted to overlay this political information in a rigid, logical way that appears orthangonal to the nature of the islands as organic shapes that exist in the middle of the cold and rugged sea.

It might have been this map that first got me thinking about the double meaning of "Political Map". Political Maps typically refer to maps that depict country borders, cities, states, etc. But once you start looking at the subjective nature of maps and their ability to represent certain political views over others, the term "political" starts to be almost a humorous label. I doubt that there could be anything but a political map of Kashmir given its disputed status between India and Pakistan.

Detail of Aleutians Type Map

The Aleutian Islands in Type
This was the next map I did after the Silk Road Map and is part of the same series of typographic maps. I made it after a trip to Alaska (though not to the Aleutians). Both before and after the trip, I was interested in purchasing a map of Alaska as a record of our journey. Whenever I saw a map of Alaska, I remember thinking that the arc of the Aleutian Islands was quite beautiful. Sometime after I made the Silk Road Map, I saw the map of Alaska again and decided that the Aleutians would make a nice map.

To build this map, I grabbed source maps from Microsoft Encarta (it was pre-Google Earth). I followed the arc from Russia to the mainland of Alaska and then tiled them together into a base map. It is difficult to see from this image but in the final map, the entire arc of the Aleutions is made up of type. There are no outlines of the islands. The first version of the map was dark type on a white background. But I later changed it to the deep blue background and reversed the type to make it look less like a traditional map. The angled white line cutting across the map is the path of the International Dateline.

The other detail that is hard to see at this image size if the color of the island names. The names of the Aleution Islands are a mix of native Aleut, Russian and America names. It is clear that certain islands were renamed under American rule while others were renamed by the Russians when they claimed Alaska. The majority of the names are Aleut names. In this map, Russian place names are red, American names are blue and native Aleut names are brown. I wonder if there is a map somewhere that has all Aleut names for the islands (as they almost certainly had before they were colonized).

The islands follow an arc that appears to connect Russian and the Asian Continent to North America. Knowing that North America was originally settled by a mass migration from Asia and down through Alaska, it is tempting to think that the path was across the Aleutians but this is not the case. The actual path was across the land bridge, north of the Aleutians that came and went several times in-between various ice ages. So what is interesting about the Aleutians is that although they were settled from Asia (a trip from West to East), the were actually settled from East to West... from the Alaskan peninsula outward.

This map, as well as the Silk Road Map got me wondering, who gets to name a place. Why do cartographers (or more typically colonial powers) sometimes keep the name used by the local population and sometimes change it. Sometimes place names are retained, sometimes they're changed and sometimes they are translated. For instance, an English map of Spain might label "Black Mountain" as Black Mountain or as Negro Mountain. Maps show signs of all these cases.

A Typographical Map of the Silk Road
Several years ago, I heard Yo Yo Ma perform with his Silk Road ensemble. He was appearing at the annual TED Conference in Monterey so he also spoke about the ensemble and its inspiration, the ancient Silk Road. His talk inspired this map. What I found particularly interesting was that to imagine the Silk Road you have to stop thinking about countries. They simply did not exist at the time. So I decided to investigate what defined the routes of the silk road as it made its way from the Mediterranean Sea to the Yangtze River in today's China. As I traced the routes in an atlas it became clear that the routes were defined by geography... primarily mountain ranges and deserts punctuatted by lakes and the occasional oasis. The geography becomes particularly clear in the mountain ranges surrounding the Hindu Kush. There the Silk Road traces its way through a knot of mountains and passes, including the infamous Khyber Pass. The Silk Road was not one route but many. One of the reasons for this is that certain routes were prone to bandits and crime. As word of this spread among travellers, they would switch to an alternate route. Yo Yo Ma referred to the Silk Road as the Internet of the ancient world. It fostered a vast exchange of ideas, goods and culture. The Stradivarius cello that he plays is itself a product of the Silk Road with the ideas and materials for the instrument coming from all over the Silk Road. While working on the map, I researched some of the Silk Road towns online. Many of the thriving trading and oasis towns of the Silk Road are shadows of their former selves... some no longer exist. But on the Internet they have a special existence. Not only do they exist in the form of thousands of links to pages describing their history but many are un-corrupted by the commercial side of the Internet. Interest in the towns is dominated by historians and not companies so you can explore the town without fear of being sold something. My Silk Road Map explores two themes... maps that are defined entirely by text and maps of places the no longer exist. Maps exist somewhere between images that we view and a document that we read. When I was a graphic designer, I created several maps that were produced as silk screens. This process required that I separate the map into separate screens for each color. In doing this, I noticed that the screen containing all of the type was still quite readable as a map. You could see the layout of the streets, parks and rivers entirely from just looking at the words. It inspired me to try and design maps like this one with the specific intention of just designing the words. The Silk Road is also a map of a place that no longer exists. In this way it is like my map of the Town of Kensico, NY. The political side of maps means that there are places all over the World that have been settled by one population and then invaded, colonized or replaced by another. This results in place names that are a mix of indigenous and colonial names. Some places (see my map of Sakhalin) go through multiple evolutions of naming. Other places names (Peking, Bombay, Madras) were renamed under colonial domination only to be changed back at a later date. The themes of my Silk Road Map... bold color, typography as geography and the politics of place are what interest me most. While I find it easier to find ideas and create my more traditional maps, I am more interested in pursuing my typographic maps.

Watercolor Map of Fire Island, NY
This is a scan of a watercolor map that I created for a couple of friends. Most of my early maps were hand-drawn as it was the only way I knew to capture the uniqueness of the geography and make larger maps (most printers were limited to letter or tabloid paper).

One of the reasons I make maps is to create records that reflect someone's specific experience of a place. Most commercial maps show common landmarks but leave out little known places that may have been key to your personal experience. We each come away from a place with our own unique string of experiences and I think maps are an excellent way to record this. My friends Jill and Steve met on Fire Island, dated there over the summers and finally got married there a week after 9/11. I created the map as their wedding present. Though not visible at this size, it shows a few of the specific places they frequented... their house on G Sreet in Seaview, the F.I. lighthouse, the ferry routes and the bars and restaurants of Ocean Beach.

One of the themes I like to explore in my maps is that maps are subjective records of a place. Maps seem objective to the layman but all maps are subjective and reflect the editorial decisions of the map maker. In some cases, this may mean mapping commercial landmarks, other times, the editorial decisions reflect the politics of a place. Although most of the Earth has been mapped, there are still an endless set of editorial variations to be created.