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.

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.