Who am I and why
am I doing this?

Becoming a mapmaker was not a straight and simple road. It has been a long journey with twists and turns.

Originally trained to build houses, I didn’t build a single house in my lifetime. This particular education wasn’t exactly what was interesting to me, it was just that all my friends went there and I followed.

I was lost for a long time on what to do. I had always been artistic with a vivid imagination but it was more random dabbling on my computer. Until 1998 I landed my first job in the graphic design industry. Even that was by accident, I originally applied to sell computers.

Fast forward some 25 years and I’ve been working continually as a graphic designer, Junior AD and Art Director. My last employment lasted over 15 years and during the last year of that phase I got really bored with advertising industry. I checked Pinterest to stay inspired on design and then one day I stumbled across an image of a map. I was completely mesmerized by the artistry of it. It was Jungfraugruppe und Aletschgletscher by Eduard Imhof. I started looking for methods to perhaps make similar maps myself. With the help of few tutorials, 2 free software packages QGIS and Blender + Photoshop, I managed to get decent results.

I “came out” as mapmaker on Reddit, where I posted my project “50 States in 50 Days” where I made a map of all 50 US States, one per day. It became really popular in the summer of 2022. Last post gathering over 3 million views. I eventually took the project to Instagram and Twitter too and gained good attention.

I’ve tried to evolve as a mapmaker ever since and this is really the only thing I do now. I want to keep artistry in cartography, a field that sometimes suffers from oversimplification and lack of visual impact. Of course remembering that my maps are mostly for decoration and not deep study and navigation. In those cases clarity is a must. But my maps remain artistic and as accurate as possible. With a little bit of grain.