What is a typographic map?
A typographic map draws a place using only words. Most of the ones you've seen are city maps, built from street names. These maps work one level up: every word is a populated place, and the outline of a whole country appears from the names of its cities, towns and villages.
Each name sits at the coordinate where that place really is. The shape of the coast, the empty mountains, the dense river valleys — none of it is drawn. It shows up because that's where people live.
How a map comes together
- The data. Every name comes from OpenStreetMap, under the Open Database License. Each one is the smallest place that has its own name: a city, a town, a village, sometimes a hamlet of a few houses. Not a municipality or a commune, so a village keeps its own name even when it officially belongs to a larger district.
- The order. Places are set by population, biggest first, each at its real position. A name that would overlap one already on the map is skipped.
- The cut. Only a small share of names fits. For the map of Europe, 785,636 places from 48 territories were in the running, and 6,592 made it onto the poster: less than 1%.
- Two layouts. In Classic, every name is the same size and the map becomes an even texture. In Population, the type size follows the number of people living there, so you can see where a country's weight sits.
Why your town might be missing
Space. Big places win the collisions, so a village right next to a large city often loses its spot. The bigger the print, the more names fit, which is why custom maps are made for the size you'll print. If one place matters to you, I can guarantee it on your copy.
Some names on these maps belong to villages that have almost emptied out. OpenStreetMap still lists them, and they stay on the map. For some families, that name is the only trace left.
So far there are over 60 maps in my Etsy shop: countries and regions across Europe, Europe as a whole, the US and several US states.