Friday Favorite: Martin Vargic

This Friday’s favorite artist is 17-year-old Martin Vargic!
Vargic is from Slovakia and specializes in creating intricate maps drawn from modern data and pop culture. Vargic’s conceptual atlases are exquisite, unexpected, amazingly detailed and brilliant!

The Map of Literature (below) is featured in his new book, Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps: Mapping out the Modern World. Vargic says: “The Map of Literature is a graphical visualization of how the world’s literature evolved from the ancient era to the present day. It took me about three weeks to design and draw the Map of Literature, however I often worked more than 15 hours a day on it.”

Map of Literature

Map of Literature (detail)

For Map of the Internet 1.0 (below), Vargic used old National Geographic maps as inspiration and drew a striking and meticulous map of the most visited websites in the world, portraying Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple as sovereign countries; the eastern continent as the “old world” with originators like Microsoft and IBM; and at the most southern tip, a forgotten wasteland of outdated and obsolete places of the past like You’ve Got Mail and Friendster.

Map of the Internet

Map of the Internet (detail)

The extraordinary Map of Stereotypes (below) is a cartogram based on a westerner’s stereotypical view of the world that assigns more than two thousand labels and pop culture references to cities, states, countries, continents, oceans, and seas on a large-scale world map.

Map of Stereotypes

Map of Stereotypes (detail)

Be sure to visit Martin Vargic's website at www.halcyonmaps.com and Facebook page at www.facebook.com/halcyonmaps to keep up with all his creative endeavors!

Have a great weekend!