The World Mapped as Pop Art

Katie Kowalsky hadn’t always known she wanted to be a cartographer. In fact, she started out as an economics major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but somewhere along the line, stumbled onto cartography. Doing so was the “best mistake” she ever made, she writes at her blog. Kowalsky goes on to explain why cartography was such a perfect fit for her:

Her Lichtenstein-esque world map is just that. Kowalsky, who now works at the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab and co-organizes Maptime Madison!, read about the value of highly aesthetic maps in the Cartographic Perspectives journal while she was conducting research under cartography professor Rob Roth. Intrigued, and inspired by beautiful pop art-based maps created by geography students at Penn State, she created her own using Mapbox Studio.