Inflating The Week

One of my favorite magazines is The Week. I enjoy it, not only because it is an informative digest of national and international news and opinions, but also because I can count on them to include maps on their covers on a regular basis!

Here we see the October 24, 2008, issue.

Other recent examples of maps on The Week can be seen here and here.

Magazine Roundup

Time for another sampling of maps on magazine covers:

	The Week September 19, 2008 Sarah Palin is having an impact on the election and nation... or is she tearing it apart?
New Scientist September 6, 2008 Talk about your global warming...
	Tikkun July August 2008 What? Do you think new worlds grow on trees?
New Yorker October 6, 2008 Revisiting the classic "View of the World from Ninth Avenue" cover, a "View of Russia from Gov. Palin's Office." For a larger version of this map, see: Strange Maps.

New New and News Maps on Magazines

Magazine cover designers never disappoint me. I can always count on a map or two every month. This month I present magazines with the word "New" or "News" in their title. How about that?

The New Republic August 13, 2008 Cover story: Trading Places by Alan Ehrenhalt The demographic inversion of the American city. The tiny image here does not do the cover justice, but it depicts the new "heart" of cities that are revitalizing, in the style of a transit map.

Two maps from the New Scientist magazine in one month! First, August 6, 2008, another transit map is used to illustrate the story by Mark Buchanan on Why complex systems do better without us

The August 20, 2008, issue fills a water balloon globe to illustrate: Looming water crisis simply a management problem, by Jonathan Chenoweth For another cover on this theme, see Squeezing out the last drops, my magazine post from earlier this month.

Finally, the September 2008 issue of ARTnews uses a map tatoo of China to introduce us to China's Art Market Boom by Barbara Pollack

Squeezing out the last drops

Three recent magazine covers using maps in their design: Scientific American, August 2008, has a cover story on the freshwater crisis. Squeezing out the last drops.

The news-digest magazine, The Week, covers Barack Obama's "celebrity" trek.

Agency Sales magazine has it's head in the clouds on the global marketplace.

#233

Land o' the Free

"When the mercury rises, it's all about freedom—to hit the road, float a lazy river, down a cold one in a mountain saloon, climb a crag or two, munch some local grub, cast for lunkers, watch the sunset from a seaside lodge."

I recently came across a July 2003 issue of Outside Magazine featuring descriptions of ten different summer road trips across the United States. Each road trip profiles the route, including "Adventure Stops", "Top Digs" (motels), "Best Eats", other "Don't Miss" opportunities, as well as recommendations for road tunes "On the Stereo"

Unfortunately, with the price of gas in 2008, I will content myself with the article illustrations by Zohar Lazar. Each article includes an illustrated map, designed to look like one of the old "Wish You Were Here" postcards.

These aren't postcards, but they should be!


#232

Maps On The Brain

A selection of recent publications with maps on the cover:

A book:

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain by George Lakoff

The author attempts to explain why a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests.



Some magazines:





The cover of this issue of The New Yorker (June 23, 2008) features cover art, “Summer Job”, by Bruce McCall.

If you cannot make out the detail, it fancifully depicts bears checking in and out of the "Employees Entrance" at a National Park, while the tourist are reminded, "No picnicing in Buffalo Wallows."

If you look very closely, you can see that, yes indeed, there is a map! A "You Are Here" map of the park for the tourists.

This cover reminds me of the old Warner Brothers Cartoon where Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog clock in, as buddies, before battling over the sheep.



“Subway Man”, by Roz Chast, graces the June 30 issue of The New Yorker. A stressed out commuter IS the transit map of Manhattan.

Finally, the June 21, 2008, issue of the New Scientist magazine features a very hot looking planet Earth, for a cover story on global warming.


#207

Plates and Babies

Two more examples of maps and globes in magazine cover design.

This issue of American Heritage is from last year. It makes clever use of old automobile license plates to create a map of the United States.

The current issue of Reason Magazine uses a globe.

Anytime a magazine talks about a "global" issue, they like to put a globe on the cover... but I like the combination of the baby and the globe. The article highlights the problem that many developed nations perceive, declining birth-rates. Yet in other parts of the world (China, India) there remain attempts to control population growth?

Didn't Paul Ehrlich predict a huge world-wide crash in the 1980s because of the population explosion?


#192

Three Globes on Magazines

Three recent magazines using globes as part of the cover design:

	The Spectator April 12, 2008
	Strategic Finance April 2008
	The Economist March 29, 2008

Body Geographic

What better way to sell a book? Combine sex and maps! OK... perhaps that is a very narrow fetish market... Nonetheless, Geography by Sophie Cunningham, must turn a few heads in book stores...
Here we see the softcover edition... Mmmmmm.... maps. Thanks to Kel, from Lost in Place.
These book covers reminded me to pull out this magazine cover I saved many years ago. I posted another example of a "body map" back in October.

Atlas Madonna

The May 2008 Issue of Vanity Fair magazine features pop singer Madonna, holding a globe of the earth on her shoulders, for their annual "Green Issue". My first thought, upon seeing this image, was of Atlas, the Greek Titan, who bore the spheres of the heavens.

Joost Depuydt, at Maps & More, saw a different Titan (of the big screen)...

After Iraq

It is always a delight to see where a map might lead me... This week, while browsing the magazine stacks in the library, I was awe-struck by the map design on the cover of the January/February, 2008, issue of The Atlantic magazine. How did I miss it when it came out? I immediately appreciated the artists intent by his use of game pieces and dice on a map of the Middle East, as if it was all some sort of game.

After Iraq, by Jeffrey Goldberg, discusses the effects of the Iraq War on the Middle East including the possibility of independence for Kurdistan from Iraq. British influence in the Middle East led to the formation of Iraq and the separation of Palestine. A large-scale conflict between Shiites and Sunnis in the Middle East could occur. Intelligence expert Ralph Peters comments on U.S. plans for the unification of Iraq and the spread of democracy.

Peters also discusses the artificial nature in which Middle-Eastern borders were created following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire:

All states are man-made. But some are more man-made than others. It was Winston Churchill (a bust of whom Bush keeps in the Oval Office) who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to a luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of west Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes-- but by then, there was nothing he could do about it.

That quote about Churchill and the arbitrary nature in which borders were redrawn after the Great War reminded me of a book I read just last year, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan. The author describes the six months following the end of the First World War when leaders of the great powers, as well as men and women from all over the world, all with their own agendas, converged on Paris to shape the peace. Wilson had noble (and naïve?) intentions of reshaping Europe (and the Middle-East) to create a lasting peace, but his frustratingly vague concepts like 'self-determination' often confused even his own advisors. Eventually, many of the borders drawn in Paris served only to forestall conflict. Just as the fall of communism exposed the underlying currents of racial strife in the Balkans, the fall of Iraq has served to re-ignite religious and ethnic tensions enclosed in the new borders.

Below are two maps from Paris 1919 that illustrate some of the many plans for divvying up the Ottoman spoils:





Another aspect of Goldberg's Atlanic article are his speculations on how the map of the Middle-East could change in the next ten to fifty years, as regimes rise and fall, and ethnic and religious differences lead to reduced, enlarged and newly created nations.



In his article, "Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look," in the June, 2006, issue of the Armed Forces Journal, Ralph Peters took a turn at re-imagining the Middle-East:



Jeffrey Goldberg talked to Peters in preparation for his Atlantic article:

Peters drew onto his map an independent Kurdistan and an abridged Turkey; he shrank Iran (handing over Khuzestan to an as-yet-imaginary Arab-Shiite state he carved out of what is now southern Iraq); he placed Jordan and Yemen on a steroid regimen; and he dismembered Saudi Arabia because be sees it as a primary enemy of Muslim modernization.

It was an act of knowing whimsy, he said. But it was seen by tbe Middle East's more fevered minds as a window onto the American imperial planning process. "The reaction was pure paranoia, just hysterics," Peters told me. "The Turks in particular got very upset." Peters explained how he made the map. "The art department gave me a blank map, and I took a crayon and drew on it. After it came out, people started arguing on the Internet that this border should, in fact, be 50 miles this way, and that border 50 miles that way, but the width of the crayon itself was 200 miles."

It certainly looks like we are nowhere near an end to turmoil in the Middle-East, and I fear that there will be more blood shed before there can be a "lasting peace". It is possible that to achieve that peace, new borders will need to be drawn...

10 Ideas That are Changing the World

Time Magazine once again treats us to a map as part of the cover design:



"10 Ideas That are Changing the World: More than money, more than politics, ideas are the secret power that this planet runs on. Here are a few you need to know about."

The Best of New York

My library's copy of the March 10-17, 2008, issue of New York Magazine has this festive cartographic image on its cover (right):



However, when I went to the magazine's website, they insist that this is the cover of the issue (left).

Do they perhaps have different covers for their city issues and the issues that go out to the hinterland? Do they assume non-New Yorkers will need this map to find their way around the Best of New York?...

UPDATE 3/12: Lauren Starke of New York magazine explains. "NY mag held a design competition for its Best of NY cover and chose 2 winners, one for subscribers (the subway map block letters) and one for newsstands. You can see runners -up here: http://nymag.com/bestofny/2008/covers/"

Thank you!

The Nation Confused by Super Tuesday

The confounding results of Super Tuesday continue to resonate through the nation and on The Nation. I missed this cover story, of the February 25 issue, when it first came out.

Apparently they were still attempting to piece together the results...

Another good example of a map used as an "element of design", as opposed to "how to find your way."

Super McCain

The UK's Economist weekly newsmagazine gave their cover story over to John McCain's Super Tuesday triumph within the United States Republican Party.

The cover features a comic strip in the shape of the United States. Scenes include:

• The "start" of the race before 2006


• The Dash for Cash


• Iowa & New Hampshire


• The Debates as boxing match


• Giuliani and Edwards get "trashed"


• Hillary tells Bill to "hush"


• Opinion polls go haywire


• Obama get the Oprah endorsement


• McCain bursts out of Super Tuesday as the Super Republican Candidate


• Clinton and Obama continue to wrestle for the title of Super Democrat


• To Be Continued...

Transit Maps of the World

I've been waiting for months, and I finally got my hands on a copy of Transit Maps: The World's First Collection of Every Urban Train Map on Earth, by Mark Ovenden. This work is a comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. With all of its colorful graphics, it makes a beautiful coffee-table book for travel and graphic design enthusiasts.

Major cities all over the globe are included. Here is an example from Tokyo:



Also included, this fanciful map of a world united by a single transit system:



The history of the London Underground can be charted by the succession of user maps that were produced through the last century:



From my collection, two postcards of the London Underground showing some growth of the extended lines:

1985	circa 1995

Below are the other two transit map postcards from my collection:



Trade offers for for additional transit map postcards are always welcome.

For additional fun with transit maps, see my earlier post.

Finally, this transit map representation of Eustace Tilley. This map was one of the winners in a contest where artists were invited to create new versions of the mascot of the New Yorker Magazine.

“Eustace Tilley Subway”, by Alberto Forero, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Time Magazine goes double with maps

How did I miss this one in November?

The November 26, 2007, issue of Time Magazine sports a spoof of a famous Norman Rockwell self-portrait:



In addition, the cover of their Europe/Asia/South Pacific edition also has fun with a map. Global Corporation? Put the globe on your brief case.

Maps on Magazine Covers

An assortment of maps on magazine covers from my collection:

If you want to demonstrate your "global reach"... put a globe on your cover...











While I suppose it is not suprising to find a map on the cover of the Journal of Geography... I particularly liked this "melting Earth" image... (see global warming).



If you want to tell your readers "we're covering the news" put a map on the cover:



Map in an editorial cartoon on a cover:



Like the recent Time magazine cover, here is a map on the body to imply how "widespread" a disease can be:

Checking China for Unusual Lumps

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Time Magazine, in their October 15, 2007, issue, illustrates the global breast cancer crisis.

Click on this site and help fund free mamograms.