I’m just finishing the second birthday map that I’ve been asked to create this year. It’s a map of one U.S. state with various towns magnified and shown as insets around the main map. The main map is a topo-map with roads, county and city labels, topography, and so on. The insets are aerial photos of particular homes or areas where particular homes used to be. Interestingly, one of the insets is of a small airport, which is the site of the birthday person’s grandparent’s old farm. Since it is a nostalgic piece I chose some fancy typefaces: Elephant by Matthew Carter for the title and some supporting information and ITC Stone Serif Medium for a larger text block.
The insets are not placed on a grid in-line with the state map because this looked sterile, especially for the more intimate type of map that this is. So instead I simply fit the insets in where they would fit, in a more organic manner. There’s even a small baby picture of the person for whom the map was made on there. There’s a small picture of the map here just so you can get a bit of an idea of what I’m talking about. Please realize that, to protect the recipient’s privacy, I’m only posting a thumbnail. (Also, the title is boxed-out because it includes the person’s name.) It’s designed for a standard frame: 16″ x 20″ with a 1″ white-space around all sides.
So, if you’re a map-maker, maybe this will inspire you to add this type of mapping to your repertoire. If you are not a map-maker and would like me to make one of these for someone in your family, let me know.
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