Atlas in a Day: Community

Virtually Maker Faire 2020

May 22nd-23rd

Guerrilla Cartography crowd-sources maps through an open call and compiles atlases on a theme within short time frames. Our first two atlas (Food: An Atlas, Water: An Atlas) are high production quality, full color, large format atlases that each took several months to create. Last year (pre-corona), we decided to see if we could make an atlas in one day. And we can! To stay true to one-day-only, we announce the theme of an Atlas in a Day Challenge (AIAD) at 9pm on a Friday night and people have until 7:30 pm the following night to send us a map on the theme, leaving us about 1.5 hours to compile the atlas--and it looks it!--at first. We do publish a pdf that night of the maps created in the past 24 hours but we also take some time (a few days) to refine the layout, create a map of the mappers, and prepare it for printing. Even the final version though is scrappy compared to our "____: An Atlas" series.

We were not planning to hold an AIAD Challenge during shelter in place as we are busy working on Shelter: An Atlas (whose theme was decided more than a year ago to compliment our Food and Water atlases). However, as a nonprofit cartographic arts organization, we felt moved to mobilize our global community of mapmakers and designers to create an atlas in response to (and in spite of, maybe) the global pandemic. So, on Friday, May 15 at 9pm PDT, we announced the theme: community. And the challenge was on. At 9pm last night the challenge ended and we had a pdf of a collection of community-themed maps all made that day. This is the scrappy version, we are currently refining it but the maps have been available to view since last night.