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Cartography is such a diverse artform, evolving throughout the decades and serving whatever purpose it needs to, ideally with a sense of style.  I came across these series of maps in an op shop, and was amazed with them.   These printed in English series of tourism brochures were made around the 1950's or 1960's, and while thematically are similar acorss the series, each map has a distinct colour scheme and style. The maps and illustrations all appear to be hand drawn, and each map has around 3-4 colours.   Each map has different folds to, the Alps one opens...

I’ve always been a bit of a gunzel, growing up just past the terminus of the Lilydale Line meant that as a youngster, the train network was my access point to the Greater Melbourne area.  Before the internet gave us easy and immediate access to Melbourne’s train network map, it was found towards the back of the Melway directory - a pre-Google maps necessity for any Melburnian.  After the completion of the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop - more commonly known to most as the underground sections the City Loop and the city’s first subway-style sections of the network - in...

Arguably, Japan and Germany are known for sharing an almost cultural obsession with efficiency.  In 2014 I visited the hometown of a good friend of mine, the city of Mannheim in Germany.  A feature of Mannheim stood out to me, the layout of streets of the CBD were in a grid layout that would be familiar with many city-dwellers, but with a nifty difference.  The blocks formed by the grid were given an alpha-numeric naming system for the benefit of locations and wayfind.  In February 2017, when I was back in Melbourne, I wanted to bring some Germanic efficiency home...

  Anyone who’s opened up the Lord of the Rings books will know the famous map of Middle Earth.  Back in 2001 I was reading these books for the first time, and in my English workbook I was drawing a simpler version of the map as it is today.  Growing up in the Shire of Yarra Ranges, both the hobbit homeland and my old stomping ground having the title of “The Shire” in common, was enough of a trigger for me in creating this map. Beyond the title though, something about that part of the world feels very “Shire-like”, the...