May 29, 2015

Road Trip Maps Across America Redbook Magazine

The story is about road trips across America, illustrated maps for redbook magazine. The maps consisted of 5 different trip routes with 3-to-4 destination cities delineated along the way that will run slightly smaller than 1/4-page. These road trip routes were envisaged as being a little loose and fun, illustrations.

The hand lettering of each trip consisted of a “name” and then references to the name of each city stop along the way, because the maps were quite small, the detail had to minimal and yet impartial as well as usable for the reader. An example of trip criteria for example. #1: “The Early America” Boston, MA, Gloucester, MA, Portsmouth, NH, Boothbay Harbor, ME. Accompanying little drawings of main attractions or activities along the way that are specific to each city stop.

The story will also have small sidebars peppered throughout that required a few more individual drawings of things like a car, bicycle, road sign, iPhone etc for the magazine article, and each sidebar consisted of hand-lettered typography such as “The best car ride games”.

The brief was challenging, as the maps were a much smaller size then I am use to creating, this also made the brief interesting, as much of much of my work is very detailed, and to be able to use less detail and to focus on the important information and content of the map, made me think more about how I could illustrate future maps which are detailed, usable and illustrative pieces of work.