Beautiful new work by Ed Fairburn

New jewelry from the Jezebel Charms Etsy store.

The Future Mapping Company’s creative cartography demands wall space.

Dissected Maps by Jeff Woodbury

Woodbury on his project:

I have always had maps around. I grew up in a military family and my father, among other things, made maps. Even after I left home I traveled, and maps offer both plans and dreams. The concept of the map is one of humanity’s earliest and greatest inventions - and one of our densest ways of storing and managing information.

I began dissecting maps in 1998. Tracing routes with a knife is similar to driving down a highway - most of what you’re left with is the road itself and a narrow band of land on either side. By cutting away everything but the roads, a map ceases to be a 2-dimensional representation of reality and becomes an actual 3-dimensional thing…

Maps are generally cheap, and their value is predicated on their usefulness. When they become outdated we throw them away. By dissecting them, their use-value is destroyed by the loss of their function. But the use-value is replaced with aesthetic value, and with it a commensurate extension of the object’s lifespan.

Maps by City Prints. Click on the images to see the locations.

Map art by Emily available in her Keep Creating Etsy store

Charming map necklaces by Sherry Truitt Studios

Beautiful map art by Ed Fairburn

Beautiful maps from the recent Cartographic Grounds exhibit at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

About the exhibit:

Cartographic Grounds reconciles the precision and instrumentality of the plan with the geographic and territorial implications of the map. In light of the ascendance of “mapping” and data visualization in design culture, and the privileging of abstract forces and flows, the exhibition reimagines the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater proximity to the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself. The approaches presented here offer landscape architecture a long-overdue reconciliation of the depiction of the ground as a site of design with the geological and geographic, the regional and the territorial. They provide contemporary design practice with clues to the imaginative intersection of the material and the digital, the data-driven and the experiential.

Read more…

Comfy cartography from VintageJamie’s Etsy store.

City Quilts, quilted maps of cities by Haptic Lab

You don’t need to be a giant to lay your head on the Himalayas while propping your feet up on the Andes. You just need these geology pillows from the geographyhandmade Etsy store.

Topographic & geographic memo pads from Geografia

Below the Boat is a project by husband and wife team Robbie and Kara Johnson 

About the project:

It’s a door into another world (one which, quite literally, lies below the boat).

Starting with a bathymetric chart (the underwater equivalent of a topographic map), the contours are laser-cut into sheets of Baltic birch and glued together to create a powerful visual depth. Select layers are hand-colored blue so it’s easy to discern land from water, major byways are etched into the land, the whole thing’s framed in a custom, solid-wood frame and protected seamlessly with a sheet of durable, ultra-transparent Plexiglas.

The result is stunning. It lifts the surface of the water back like a veil, exposing the often-overlooked, under-explored, awe-inspiring world that lies below. To those familiar with the floor of the ocean or the bed of a lake, it’s a beautiful reminder of the deep channels, sharp drop-offs, and mountainous landscapes that are hidden from normal view. To the uninitiated, it’s wonderfully eye-opening; as though the world suddenly took on a fourth dimension.

Folded by Eva Black