Days at award winning Axis Maps in Hewitt, Texas, are spent creating “custom cartography for the digital age.” For 10 years, this small company’s employees have been doing exceptional work combining their expertise in the traditions of cartography with innovative interactive media. Now they’ve added an artistic endeavor to their list of accomplishments—city maps created entirely with type fonts.
For Mark Harrower, Ph.D., Ben Sheesley, Ph.D. and Andy Woodruff, like many creative people, there comes a time when an idea just has to be followed–for the pleasure of the work and the love of the project. That time came for them when Andy decided to expand on a concept he had used for a party announcement. The project just took on a life of its own. After almost two years, maps of Chicago and Boston are now finished.
The guys at Axis Maps say of their Typographic Maps, “Created as a labor of love, these unique maps accurately depict the streets and highways, parks, neighborhoods, coastlines, and physical features of the city using nothing but type. Only by manually weaving together thousands upon thousands of carefully placed words does the full picture of the city emerge. Every single piece of type was manually placed, a process that took hundreds of hours to complete for each map.”
More maps to come—San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. are next. Can’t wait to see the streets of the nation’s capital.
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