Geography Makes Me Giddy.

Please welcome to yellowtrace my dear friend Kimberley Crofts. Kimberley is a communications and information designer who currently works at Meld Studios, a service and interaction design agency in Sydney. She is passionate about social welfare, the environment, and equality. She is also an all around super cool chick. But don’t just take my word for it – check out her rocking post below. – x dana

When I was at university and couldn’t afford to go out let alone travel overseas, my flatmate and I would play a game called ‘what capital is that?’.  In the game, we trawled the atlas for obscure countries and quizzed one another on their capitals. Scintillating fun I hear you say. Well, we were poor and there may have been drinking involved.

Years later, my interest with maps has increased. Fortunately with it is my ability to travel to far away places.

Why do I like maps? I think it’s because it places us within the context of the wider world. We can compare where we are with where we’ve been and where our friends are. Although it seems that Google has cornered the market on maps, I still prefer my maps to be tangible. As a nod to Dana, our travelling host on yellowtrace, I thought I’d collect a few of my favourite printed maps to show you.

As a designer with a typographic bent my favourite maps-as-art usually involve letters. My absolute favourite is London Kerning, a gigantic map of London designed by NB Studio where all lines have been removed and only the name of the street remains. Typography fans of The Clash will get the pun. It is currently sold out, alas, but I am hoping they’ll reprint it one day. Here’s a little look:

Closer to home is this typographic map of the inner west of Sydney (below left). Designed by Suburban Type, it’s A2 size and available on Made It. They also produce maps of other areas such as the regions of Italy (below centre). Bold & Noble have an Australian typographic map printed on off white recycled stock (below right). They’d make lovely birthday presents methinks.

Design Ahoy from Chicago has letterpress printed some luscious maps of the world similar to those above, where borders are replaced with type. The maps are printed in black ink, with latitude and longitude lines blind embossed.

If you are going to splash a map across your wall then might I suggest you spend a little time researching the projection you use, after all, you never know when you might have a cartographer over for tea. For example, the projection that most children in Australia are introduced to has Australia in the centre of the map, but if you go to Europe or America you’ll find that we’re relegated to the outer edges whilst they take the prime centre real estate. Who’s the most important country in the world? It’s all a matter of context.

Most of the map wallpaper I’ve found to buy has Australia located at the edges. You could of course cut the wallpaper and hang it as you see fit. The Wallpaper Shop has a pre-pasted map. Or you can buy a slightly wider one at the Map Shop or from Wall Murals.  This sort of map would look lovely on a wall as Anita Kushal has shown (below left) in her book FamilyLifeStyle (available on Amazon). Personally, I prefer a more monotone map, as per the House & Garden magazine spread (below right). You could replicate this look I guess by blowing up an image of an antique map and plan printing it.

Personally, my favourite projection (is it sad that I have a favourite?) was drawn in 1954 by R.Buckminster Fuller and is called the Dimaxion Map. In this projection, Bucky extended his desire to solve the world’s problems through design. He hoped that by displaying all the world’s countries as one continuous island we might be “better equipped to address challenges as we face our common future”. You can buy one of these maps on the Buckminster Fuller Institute online store.

The Dimaxion Map. Image courtesy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Speaking of projections, fans of the West Wing may remember an episode which contained a brief discussion on the social policy consequences of  inaccurate geographic perceptions. In a lot of common projections, Africa and Greenland appear to be the same size, yet Africa is actually 14 times the size of Greenland. Distortions are caused through stretching a spherical world to fit a flat map.

You might though prefer then to view your map as a sphere, in which case I’d recommend a trip up to David met Nicole on Cleveland Street in Surry Hills. They have a good range of vintage globes such as the ones below. They also have some lovely vintage school maps, the sort that hang from wooden poles.

Keeping with the spherical theme are these ‘atlases’ by Simryn Gill (below). They were exhibited recently at the National Art School in Sydney as part of a collection of artists who use erasure as a form of creation.

Simryn Gill ‘Four atlases of the world and one of stars’, 2009 paper, glue, dimensions variable © the artist.

If you would like to be able to compare country sizes, French artist Armelle Caron has helpfully organised them all by size in her obsessiveLe monde rangé. She also pulls apart city blocks and sorts them by size, such as that for Paris (below):

Still on the cut out theme, Susan Stockwell’s work concentrates on issues of ecology, mapping and geo-politics. Her delicate cut outs trace the arteries of major cities such as London (below).

Karen M O’Leary also painstakingly cuts out her maps by hand and sells them on her Etsy store. In an interview with The Jailbreak, the artist described her work: “I love the idea of a completely familiar object made new and even more beautiful”. I couldn’t agree more.