The World Painted

I truly love cartography as an art form. In my projects, I always strive to find the balance — between perfectionism, artistic expression, mathematical and factual accuracy and simply getting things done.

Whenever my friends asked me, “Where can I find a good world map?”, I never found a proper answer. If I’m being honest, I don’t like most of what you find in shops or online.

So… we made our own.

Meanwhile, Sergey began sketching layout options (since we print on demand, we had to work with a fixed set of sizes), while Katya started painting the watercolour base (you can ind their behind-the-scenes stories in their own sections).

Things were starting to take shape!

We are trying to determine how best to combine the main map with the polar insets.

The corners of the layout naturally suggest themselves for their placement, yet as there are four of them, our first instinct is to attempt to occupy all corners with something.

Perhaps a cartouche, or an inset of particularly dense areas (Europe, the Caribbean), could be placed there?

The form of the Robinson projection lends itself naturally to presenting the map within an oval.

It looks impressive, yet the poles are left without space (unless they are shown as separate circles), and with print-on-demand no one is going to trim maps to such a complex outline.

So we have decided to keep to the rectangle, use only two corners for the insets, and raise the main map slightly.

In theory, it all sounded simple — divide it into continents and oceans. In practice, that’s when the fun began. I tested colours digitally, then on paper. Labelled pigments, tried out little swatches. I trusted the paper straight away — my favourite British cotton. Everything else was up in the air. Truly — everything.

I scanned it all at home, piece by piece. Assembled it in Photoshop like a carefully restored jigsaw puzzle. Some bits I polished up, others I left with their handmade textures. Nepal needed rescuing — the format just didn’t allow for tiny details. Africa, though — I’m still a little in love.

It was a big, occasionally bewildering, but thoroughly delightful project. I’d do it completely differently now. But I say that about every project.

Then a year later, I look back and think:
“Blimey. Did I really draw that?..”

We then dove into the long, patient process of developing our map’s visual language — what the base layer would look like, which features to include and how to show them, and which symbols and fonts to use.

That’s when Milana joined the project — picking up the cartographic side: label placements, font curation, data checks, improving the symbology

There are cartographers (and designers) who are able to devise systems in advance and follow them faithfully. And then there are those who invent everything on the fly, through practice — and I am definitely one of the latter.

Although my very first task was meant to be developing labelling styles and then applying them, in reality I began at the end: I invented styles intuitively, as I went along, and only afterwards made adjustments to gather my ideas into some sort of system.

Still, I lacked the focus to work on labels alone in a steady sequence, so I found myself darting from South America to Africa, and halfway through fleeing to Australia instead.

I can no longer retrace the entire sequence, so I will briefly comment on a few of the decisions made for individual layers.

The first thing I felt compelled to do was to overhaul the hydrography labels. In the draft version, everything was set in Frutiger — an excellent typeface, yet the sinuous river labels tended to fall apart in it, evoking the look of cheap mass-market contour maps. After much debate, weighing both objective and subjective qualities, we settled on Bitter as the most fitting choice for our watercolour hydrography.

I don’t particularly enjoy starting the design of a map with choosing typefaces; it always feels slightly painful. Compromise is especially crucial in cartography: a clean, highly legible font often ends up having no personality, while a striking and characterful one is usually too flamboyant and difficult to read.

In contrast with the literally tangible forms of relief, islands and peninsulas are little more than conventional nicknames for pieces of land. That is why they are given in a light, fine typeface.

The most difficult part for me was the oceanic relief: I don’t know it offhand in the same way I do the landforms; it is less legible against the base and demanded more simplification. I tried to keep the labelling styles in harmony with those on land, to label primarily those features that could be read against the watercolour background, and to retain only the more or less familiar toponyms that would actually mean something to the reader.

One separate issue was generalisation. The source of the labels betrayed its origin through an uneven density of information: in the United States even selected national parks were labelled, in Canada practically every sizeable lake and some villages with populations of around 87 people, while Siberia, Amazonia, and much of Africa stood out in their emptiness. I tried to even out the density of labels as much as possible, to avoid pointer arrows, and to label only those features that are visible at the given scale and actually drawn in the base layer.

Without any particular heuristic, I kept some historical regional names. Simply because I wanted to, and because “Transvaal” says more to a reader than, say, the Drakensberg.

In short, my contribution turned out to involve a great deal of invisible geographical research and fact-checking, in addition to the straightforward task of placing labels.

We are adjusting the sizes and refining the placement of the polar insets so that the main map retains plenty of space and the poles do not obscure important areas.

Once it is clear how much space remains between the poles, we fill it with information, starting with the map title.

And then comes the most important question — what colour the background will be. We try black, white, and a neutral blue, and virtually test them against both dark and light walls.

We make printouts to assess them in real life.

The black background won, but only on the condition that it is not pure black, but slightly grey.

This evolves into the idea of hanging our map in space with stars. We recreate the atmospheric gradient based on photographs from the ISS.

Once again, we go through different title options.

We like the cosmic background, but at the moment it is just randomly scattered dots, whereas we want it to feel like real space. So we look at how the Earth appears from afar.

We explore sources that can provide the star layout in vector form.

It seems that a starry sky in the Robinson projection would suit the map well, even though it will have to be cropped.

We adjust the sizes and style of the stars.

We try it on the map. It looks magnificent, though it needs to be toned down a little.

When switching to the dark background, we also changed the graticule from white to blue so that the lines would remain legible even over ice. Now it is time to introduce breaks in the graticule to improve the readability of the labels.

We highlight what makes the polar circles and the tropics noteworthy.

If someone asks me what I was doing in my free time at the start of 2025, I’ll say: chopping ice!

The task appeared when the watercolours were finished and the layout was nearing completion. thought I’d get it done in a few evenings — neat and beautiful.

Nope. I went through every stage: denial, pain, despair, acceptance… sometimes more than once.

First I searched for the right approach. Then I tried to match it to the map and its scales. Then I hunted for a way to make all those ice floes work in a single visual key. I printed, compared with reality, showed it to the team. The guys said the ice couldn’t possibly break along the logic I’d invented. I was angry at them, then agreed, went back, reshaped and shifted the floes.

In the end, the ice took more time and nerves than all the continents and oceans combined. But its “crumbly” texture perfectly tied together the precise, carefully balanced layout and the hand-painted watercolour. The ice became a visual bridge in the graphic language.

There was a moment when I lost faith in myself. We even discussed releasing the map without the ice caps. eep breath. Exhale. I regained strength, sharpened my axe, and finished the job.

Now I can’t imagine this map without ice. Without it, it feels bare and unwelcoming.

And on my CV I can now officially write: skilled in ice-breaking (in graphic editors).

In a couple of places, I hid Easter eggs. They’re not easy to find, but who knows — maybe you’ll spot them?