Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Linzie Hunter has posted a Flickr set of some recent super-charming map illustrations.

Previously: Linzie’s Spam One-Liners

Some lovely play with typography+maps over at Ork posters. All American cities so far. Toronto is coming soon they say. Hey, Orkers, don’t forget Montreal.

(via Austin Kleon)

Twelve animals made from a map of the world (Flash warning). Design by Kentaro Nagai.

Thanks, Elaine.

Among other things, Aaron Meshon illustrates plenty of fun maps like this one.

These are so cool — who knew that this was even a genre? Over at the always-impressive Bibliodyssey, PK offers up some brilliant satirical maps from World War One that double as political cartoons.

Maps that featured regional stereotypes, animals and assorted symbolic imagery and mythical and historic figures associated with particular countries became a popular vehicle in which prejudices, humour and political commentary could be assembled in a visual format.

The rise of the serio-comic map caricature genre, that had really begun in about 1870 (although the roots of the tradition stretch back at least to Munster’s ‘Geographica’** from the mid-1500s), reached its peak of popularity at the beginning of World War One.

The humorous propaganda maps stirred nationalistic fervour, mocked and belittled enemies and even served as a mnemonic tool for students to learn their geography. In many of the above maps you can see that the more distorted or grotesque depictions are saved for the least favoured nations while the home side is of course rendered as normal or heroic. The style declined in popularity as the war dragged on and film and posters became the more dominant media of propaganda.

Via the Strange Maps blog comes this charming illustration of Sherlock Holmes’ residence. It’s by Tokyo based illustrator Russell Stutler. He has several free printable versions on his site, including one with notes.

The amount of detail in these fish-eye cityscapes from architect-turned-cartoonist Hartwig Braun is craaaazy.

Check out the lovely and elaborate maps created by Christa Dichgans, as seen here.

I found this link via the Strange Maps blog, which is also worthy of your attention.

Vector fans, behold the work of Arthur Mount. I’m a big fan of well-drawn infographics and maps, and Arthur’s are lovely. He also did all the artwork for this animation on Boeing’s website.