Back by popular demand, a second printing of the Atlas of Design is now available for purchase. Order yours today.

And tell everyone you know.

Atlas of Design: We’ve reanimated Harry Beck’s corpse and he’s coming toward your house now. What will you guys say to each other?

Cameron: I’d tell him that I think his London Underground diagram is one of the foremost and influential pieces of informational graphic design ever, and is still in use today, adopted the world over by almost every transit agency and budding map designer. He’d just say “BRAAAIINNNSSS!” and then things would get a little awkward.

Click to preview pages 10-13.

AoD: Are transit directions on our phones making us better or worse as navigators?

Cameron: Judging by the outcry over the removal of transit directions from iOS6, it’s made us far, far worse. Apparently, we are now absolutely incapable of catching a train or bus – something that humans had been doing for almost a century before the iPhone – without a little gizmo to show us the way. Personally, I’ve successfully navigated many transit systems in the US and Europe using only printed maps and my own sense of direction, so I’m not actually all that upset about the loss of transit directions on my phone.

AoD: Where is D.B. Cooper?

Cameron: I’d tell you, but he said that I wouldn’t get my share of the cash if I did.

Yes, there will be more interviews as we count down to the official release of the Atlas! To keep up to date, subscribe by email or RSS using the links to the right, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Atlas of Design: After the inevitable robot takeover, you are hired to teach cartography to our new digital masters. What is their first lesson?

Adam:010100110111010001101111011100000010000001110100011010000110100101101110011010110110100101101110011001110010000001100001011000100110111101110101011101000010000001110000011010010111100001100101011011000111001100100000011000010110111001100100001000000111011001100101011000110111010001101111011100100111001100101110

You read that right. Stop doing that. I would instruct the robots to bring in more tactile emotion mixed with a helping of heart. Then I would point and laugh and increase my fees.

Click to preview pages 52-54

AoD: Why did you put this map on ice for a time?

Adam: I’m sure it’s the same with most cartographers—and freelance designers in general—that you always have some pet projects in the mix when a big priority and time-sensitive gig jumps the queue. So in part, this project got bumped because of that. On this map it actually gave me more time to work on new techniques involving actual real life brushes and ink washes and—gasp—paper. Real paper. Everything was eventually scanned into the computer and composited on screen through various opacity masks and overlays, but there is a human’s touch at the core of these maps, which is why I think they’ve been received so well.

AoD: This map was made to hang in an oyster bar you frequent. Are you planning on making maps for other kinds of food you eat?

Adam: I am actually really interested in the geography of food. At one level are the distribution channels that bring ingredients from the farm to our tables. Unfortunately, it feels like people are only interested in where their food comes from when there is a contamination event and it suddenly becomes very important to know exactly where your cantaloupe came from.  One pet project I’ve been kicking around is to map the assembly of a hamburger, and look at how those patterns shift for various locations around the country.

At another level, the geography of food encompasses the French concept of terroir, or the “taste of place,” which I find equally fascinating. The idea is that unique combinations of temperature and soil chemistry and rainfall and all of the other elements that go into growing or raising food are expressed in the subtle variations of the end product. With oysters, these factors include the depth and temperature of the water, direction of the current, whether the oysters are raised entirely at depth, or if they spend a time in shallows. Resource constraints didn’t allow me to explore that with the oyster maps, (ultimately, the maps weren’t supposed to stand alone anyway as the servers at the Oyster Bar will use the maps to discuss growing conditions and how it affects the variety with their guests) but it’s something I’d like to incorporate into a future revision of the series.

Even more interviews are on the way as we count down to the official release of the Atlas! To keep up to date, subscribe by email or RSS using the links to the right, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Atlas of Design: “Axis Maps” — isn’t that kind of a sinister company name?

Ben Sheesley: Yeah, but we always try to use our powers for good, not evil. The name really just comes from the mathematical and geometrical use of that word, as in ‘the earth revolves on its axis.’ We’ve always been more interested in cool maps than world dominance.

Click to preview pages 4-7

AoD: Myriad Pro — defend your typeface choice!

Ben: Narrow and condensed fonts are great for typographic maps because they allow us to squeeze more letters on a line (or in an area). This makes for a nice, dense overall look and feel, but perhaps more importantly makes it easier to read all those short streets with really long names. Myriad Pro is a huge family with a number of condensed and semi-condensed variants. I’ve also always appreciated its friendly yet professional personality.

AoD: When are you guys going to make some shaded relief maps with type?

Ben: I’ve toyed with the idea of a typographic shaded relief map but so far have been focused mainly on streets. Mapping colored numbers like this has some real possibilities, I think. At one point, I wondered if a hachuring-type of representation would be another approach, with heavier, denser labeling in the steeper areas. There’s probably other ways to think about it, too. I’d love to see someone make an attempt!

More interviews are on the way as we count down to the official release of the Atlas! To keep up to date, subscribe by email or RSS using the links to the right, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

We received about 140 different entries as part of our initial call for submissions earlier this year. These came from about 90 authors/groups, as sometimes an author would submit multiple works for consideration. Once the submission deadline passed, we were faced with the difficult task of paring this cartographic cornucopia down into a handful of finalists.

To help us in this task, we recruited several volunteer judges, who spent hours looking over each selection and giving each a score. Helping us out were:

Tanya Buckingham, University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab
Elbie Bentley, United States Geological Survey
Hannah Fairfield, Washington Post (now at the New York Times)
Bernhard Jenny, Oregon State University
Tom Patterson, United States National Park Service
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Stamen Design

We, the editors, joined them in the panel:
Daniel Huffman, somethingaboutmaps
Tim Wallace, University of Wisconsin-Madison (now at The Huffington Post)

Several of the judges were also entrants to the competition, and a number of them are featured in the final volume. The cartographic world is pretty small, and so it’s not altogether surprising that this would happen. Judges recused themselves when scoring their own work, and in cases of any other conflicts of interest. Their inclusion was by acclaim of their peers; they had no say in their own selection.

Together this panel of eight judges represented a wide variety of employments (academia, government, private industry, and the media), aesthetic tastes, and opinions on what makes great design. Such a diverse panel was often in disagreement; it was not uncommon to find a map that some judges loved while others hated, and almost none were universally acclaimed or disliked. Instead, each map appealed to some and not others. This disagreement was exactly our goal in bringing the panel together, because our aim was to ensure that the final selections held something for everyone. We wanted the final selection to be broadly appealing, rather than being dominated by one style or taste. Our final selection features a broad array of looks and subjects — from elaborate and traditional political maps to starkly minimalist experimental pieces. Very few people will consider every single one of our 27 finalists to be “great,” but we believe that people of every aesthetic preference will find plenty to enjoy in the pages of the Atlas.

Once each judge scored every work (except those in which they recused themselves), we two editors averaged the scores and ranked them. Then we went through the ranked list and picked out the top ones to include in the final volume. There was some decision-making to be done at this point. We decided early on that no author would be featured more than once in the volume, in order to showcase as many people as possible. So, that meant that, if an author had multiple pieces that were highly ranked (as happened in a few cases), we made the decision as to which of their pieces we would include.

Once that was all settled, we got in touch with the finalists and those who weren’t selected, and started down the long road of putting together a book of maps. We hope you’re as excited by the outcome as we are.

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.

This will be a library-quality book. It’s being offset-printed on 80 lb satin stock. Everything will be hardcover bound and smyth sewn. Since the binding is sewn, rather than cheaply glued, it will lay fairly flat, and it’s sturdy enough to last a very long time. The final product will be 8.5″ x 11″, 88 pages. Everything is being done by American Printing, in Madison, WI.

The related question to all this is: why make a printed book in the first place? We could publish in digital media, instead.

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 this book is being 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 the book, 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.