New York-based designer and inventor, Archie Archambault, delivers hi-quality chart content. His idea of a good time? Translating the world around him into minimalist maps and diagrams that help simplify complex ideas.
“When I started taking this design practice seriously, I went in a dozen different directions,” Archambault relayed in an interview with the Ohh Deer blog. “Most of it was type and image with quippy or impactful messages. I made things that were funny, clever, crude, and everything in-between, but the maps were by far the biggest hit and I really enjoyed making them. Then my brain became like this map-thinking machine and I stopped thinking about other things.”
Now, completely hooked on the idea of maps and charts, he travels all over the world, exploring cities and creating more diagrams. After asking residents a lot of questions and thinking really really hard, he assembles to map, referencing current and past maps.
But his maps and diagrams also include other things, that go way beyond geography. “I make letterpress ‘maps from the mind’ of cities, planets, organs, and many other subjects,” he explained. “They’re all super-simple distillations of the complex ideas.”
Take a look at some of the finished results: