Maps and ways to display data are a constant source of design inspiration for me…
I designed this new broadside, Walk Empty-handed, after talking to my friend Cathy about quilting and patterns and words. (I wrote about that conversation in this post.) Since then I’ve been playing around with maps and their white spaces. This is a limited edition 8″x10″ letterpress print, 25 in all.
The quote is from José Saramago: “Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world.”
Recently as my friend Cathy was showing me her latest quilting project, I felt a pang of jealousy and then frustration. She’s been working in fabric and color and with patterns of those colors for a long time and very successfully. I’ve been trying to design broadsides that marry type and patterns of color with little success — type alone or patterns alone yes, but not together. I blurted out “where would you put type or words or a quote in your quilts” and after a minute she said “in the white space between the colors.” I went from frustration to “aha!” Later, in an email, she suggested I look at maps as patterns. From there I was off and running.
I started playing around with shapes from a map and putting words in the roads and streets. Looking through my book of quotes, scanning for ones appropriate to maps, I remembered that many of my own haiku are about my walks. And that’s how my latest book got started. Above is one of the spreads. Below is the resulting book, titled “Walking“. You can see more pictures here.
