Charming map necklaces by Sherry Truitt Studios

Beautiful map art by Ed Fairburn

A couple of the items I’ve added to my Thinx Gifts store for the “worldly” drinkers out there.

These wonderful map and vintage photo collages by Jackie Bassett are available in her Etsy store

Blinking City by design duo Instant Hutong (Marcella Campa & Stefano Avesani) 

About the project:

Blinking City is a project investigating the inadequacy of traditional maps for city environments characterized by fast pace transformation and urban growth. As soon as the map is done, the city it describes has already gone. We transferred one of the Blinking City pattern, based on a collage of several Hutong neighbourhoods of Beijing, onto a wall of a dilapidated courtyard house in Xianyukou district, located in the core of the city.

The world according to Sara Drake 

These data visualization maps from the PBS series America Revealed are as dazzling as they are informative. Click on the images to see what they represent.

About the show:

Based upon the BBC’s award-winning Britain From Above. America Revealed is a unique look at what makes America tick, what it takes to keeps the biggest food machine in the world going, the delicate balance that keeps our supermarkets stocked with groceries and fast food restaurants supplied with fries. How we keep America moving with its vast and complex transport systems. How we propel ourselves through energy, what maintains the constant supply of fuel and electricity to our homes and businesses and finally how we keep up with the ever changing world, the import and export infrastructure that shapes our manufacturing industry.

From the Corn farmer in Central Valley, California to the live wire cable repairers in New Jersey. Viewers will discover a fascinating new perspective on the hidden patterns and rhythms of American life, by looking through the eyes of individuals who all play a part in keeping America fed, moving, powered and making goods.

America Revealed uses beautiful and breath-taking aerial photography to provide an otherwise unseen view of America and use original data visualizations to demonstrate how our systems work.

This fun and incredibly detailed map of London was drawn by hand by Jenni Sparks.

About the project:

The map was commissioned by Harry Hayes at Evermade.com who wanted to create a map of London that was different to the usual tourist stuff and gave a sort of true reflection of the city in all its historic, busy and eccentric glory.

Despite almost crippling my hand and going boss-eyed, I absolutely LOVED this project. When I first started out I knew hardly anything about London, and the hours of researching and exploring the city would probably qualify me to be a tour guide now!

Plate maps by Seletti. I want to collect them all. 

These elegant Metrobowls designed by Frederik Roijé are made from maps of Amsterdam and New York. 

For his project Complexcity, Korean designer Lee Jang Sub maps the urban sprawl of major cities and then transfers them to a variety of mediums. Click on the images to see the locations of the maps above.

Robert Walden’s beautifully minimalist hand drawn maps

Walden on his work:

Ontology is a central theme throughout my work because it deals with the nature of existence or being by analyzing concepts about essence, substance, time, location, space, and identity. My work addresses these ideas by building upon physical, temporal, and literal metaphors that are often used to convey ideas about a process as well as a product. For instance, each drawing is not only a finished work that represents a place, but it is also a reflection of the hand of the artist, the act of making lines. Each of these drawings involves a labor-intensive process where much time is needed for construction and development. Once the drawing is complete, it is a picture of time. That is, each drawing reveals the time it takes to make a road map and then each finished drawing actually represents that time. All along, there is a literal play on mapping. Each drawing represents a process (of mapmaking, of creating roads) and a place (a representation of existence that can be either real or imagined).