The Atlas of Design is meant to be a showcase of beautiful and inspiring work, and we realized early on that this meant we had to make sure the physical book, itself, lived up to its contents. We believe that high-quality cartography should be printed with high-quality materials. We want to honor our contributors by giving their work the best presentation we can. We want to make sure everyone who buys this book receives something that feels good to hold, that has a substance and weight to it. Something worth owning.

Why make a printed book in the first place? We could publish in digital media, after all…

Perhaps we are merely anachronistic, but we believe in the experience of holding a physical object in your hands. One that was purpose-made. A web browser, an e-book reader, a PDF viewer—these are all empty vessels. They load in digital content, then quickly dump it out of memory and replace everything with the next file. But our book is constructed solely to deliver these maps to you. That this is a single-purpose object speaks to the significance of its contents. And, as we discuss in the opening of Volume I, form is integral to function. The medium is part of the experience, and the printed book makes that experience more satisfying to the senses than the instantly-resizable, searchable, no-thumbing-through-pages, weightless, unscented, one-size-fits-all digital reader. We don’t want these maps to be ephemeral. We want them to live in your house.