Report from NYC: Ork Posters

It's great to be back to my weekly posts from NYC! I'm starting the year out by showing you a graphic approach to my adopted city.
xx Kelly

Jenny Beorkrem, designer and founder of Ork Posters in Chicago, has come up with a fresh approach to map design.

She breaks up each city into its named sections, varying the size of the typeface to communicate the jumble of distinct neighbourhoods. It's a bold, modernist take on mapmaking, unlike anything I've seen before. Something about packing all those letters into tight spaces conveys the sense of how densely populated and so very large these metropolitan areas are.

Besides New York City and Brooklyn, my obvious favourites, Ork Posters now offers maps of Chicago, Manhattan, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, the Great Lakes, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington DC.
Beorkrem descided to design the typographical maps after a fruitless search for a Chicago neighborhood poster that would look good on her wall. "The project became quite cumbersome with 91 Chicago neighbourhoods in all," she said. Of all the cities that she has mapped, her hometown has the highest number of neighbourhoods.

Her new project has done so well, that even big name brands like Nike have begun imitating her.