Gallery: The Atlas of Design Is Back, With More Wonderfully Funky Maps
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The biennial *The Atlas of Design* is back in its third edition. It's filled with funky and unexpected maps, like this Roy Lichtenstein-inspired one from Amy Lee Walton.
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"The United States: Her Natural and Industrial Resources" shows just that: the legend in the corner denotes kinds of land use (pastoral, fallow land, etc.) and resources (uranium, wind power, etc.).
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Eleanor Lutz, map-maker extraordinaire, created this map of Mars, if it were drawn by explorers from medieval times. She combined a hand drawn topographic map of Mars with a layer of actual topographic data from NASA.
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"UFO Sightings," by John Nelson, takes an incredibly detailed (and luminescent) look at self-reported alien sightings since 1925.
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One of the more conventional maps in the book, "Bob Marshall Country" from Cairn Cartographics shows a slice of land in Montana. It doesn't show grids and trail mileages, revealing a more pristine cartographic view.
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“The Magnificent Bears of the Glorious Nation of Finland,” by Finnish designer Annukka Mäkijärvi, defies much of what you would expect from a map. It uses an illustration of cartoon bears, squashed together into the shape of the Scandinavian country, to show bears per capita.
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"Alternative Strategic Spatial Vision of Natural Disaster Prevention in Future Shanghai" shows just about that, in this busy chart.
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This cartoonish chart of Amelia Earhart’s last flight is one of the more experimental "maps" to make into *The Atlas of Design*. The map is, obviously, less geographical than it is thematic.
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And here, we have a map of Antarctica, made by cartographer Brad Herried for the Polar Geospatial Center. Take a good look, this icy part of the world is fast changing.
