In today’s modern aesthetic of white, crisp, and clean, much beauty and artistry has been lost in some of the previously more ornate items in our day to day life. Whether that be buildings leaving decorative columns for sleek metals or hand-painted building-side advertisements opting for bulky, obtuse highway billboards, the beauty of detail has been lost. One place this is well seen is in maps. 

Now as we open the digitized app to enter directions from here to there, we’re greeted with green and blue lines with occasional location titles. However, maps have been a source of information and eve beauty for centuries before we trimmed them down to their essentials on our phones.

Early maps date back thousands of years to carvings on mammoth tusks and constellation based star paintings. However, the first true cartographic renders that we’d recognize as maps today date back to the 200’s AD. Claudius Ptolemy began to outline latitude and longitude coordinate systems for the little that was known of the world, mostly centered around the Mediterranean sea. Major cities and thoroughfares were as easy to find on these maps as warnings of treacherous terrain, symbols for pirate or marauder dens, and decorative creatures like sea serpents or gryphons.

These maps told a story, mostly of who created the map or which empires were central to economic commerce at the time of creation. The Tabula Rogeriana (1154) for example, became the most advanced map at the time as it highlighted geographic points like forests, mountains, and valleys but also lines of territory demarcation between cities and nations.

Quickly, maps and globes house decorative features just as much as important spacial indicators. Colored keys and iconography found its way into allowing users to learn more about the area of which they looked.

With the growth of knowledge about the world and the need for more constant transportation (boats, trains, cars, and planes), these map projections have shifted with our needs and usage. Now of course, most maps have lost much of their artistry and flamboyance in place of user-friendliness and digital codability. Though the beauty of the maps of old still enchants us in museums, castles, and churches to this day.
MAP HISTORY
MAP FUNDAMENTALS
MAP HISTORY 2