A map style inspired by the pop art movement
By: Amy Lee Walton
Drawing inspiration from the likes of Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and in particular, Roy Lichtenstein, our latest designer style Whaam! is a unique base for telling your story.
Pop artists created work that mimicked machine made objects with hand strokes. In fact, Lichtenstein himself characterized his work as “not American painting but actually industrial painting”. To capture the whimsey of the movement, I designed this style using four features: a limited but vibrant color palette, thick black line strokes, “Ben-Day Dot” texture, an expressive display font, and starbursts!
For those not familiar, Ben-Day dots are the small colored circles that give the map its classic comic book feel. That’s because they were used by early comic book publishers to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as green, purple, orange, and flesh tones.
Behind the design
It’s the subtle textures that really bring this design alive. Pairing small, dark cyan dots closely spaced over a solid, light cyan background provided a slight optical illusion as you zoom in on the map, in true pop art fashion. The use of primary and secondary CMYK colors hint at traditional printing variations for a vibrant and playful visual read.
As cityscapes form, roads are styled with a heavy black stroke from motorways to secondary streets, each with varying thickness and opacity based on hierarchy. The final touch of whimsy is the handwritten-style display font for major city labels in bright red and the custom vector starburst in a royal blue used for highway shields.
Make it yours
Import Whaam! into your Studio account and begin customizing the layers to make it your own! Try changing the typeface and color palette first, then make custom vector patterns of your own and swap them in for the water or landusepatterns I’ve used here. Or replace the starburst with your own vector shield.
Whaam! is the fourth designer map we’ve released this summer. Make sure you try out the others — Standard is a retro-inspired map based on early twentieth century automotive maps. Moonlight combines a minimalist-palette backdrop with a modern type face; it’s great for branding. North Star reinterprets classic nautical maps; it’s perfect for displaying any maritime themed data.
Whaam! was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.