Charming comics

Thanks to Maktaaq for turning me onto the witty, whimsical comics of cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld.

Simple sketches

Oh My Cavalier!, art by Julianna Swaney.

Via eluvium.

Roads to nowhere

The Map Realm is a collection of maps of fictional countries created by professed "avid map collector and roadgeek" Adrian Leskiw. There are even multiple iterations of the same territories mapped through time, from the seventies into the mid-21st century. Meticulous and absorbing.

Bold illustration

Illustrator Dan McCarthy does a few things very well: trees, power lines, ships, houses, skeletons. At least, these are the things he does repeatedly. More generally, he's a master at bold compositions relying on the interplay between line and negative space, from rigging to cables to twigs to ribs. Not only is there some stellar work on display here, but also a limited selection of very affordable and very beautiful prints for sale.






Creative director Gregori Saavedra is a prolific commercial illustrator whose stark line work replicates the look of photographs run through a trace filter, to beautiful effect. His portfolio also includes a variety of stylish video and other work.

No calendars, please

Earlier this year I wrote about how hard it was to find interesting, stylish, high-quality calendars year after year. Well, I wanted to warn you against showering me in calendar gifts this Christmas, because I found enough to tide me over for a few more years, at least.

Most exiting is the discovery that illustrator Steve Thomas, whose retrofuturistic space travel posters I showed off a while ago, offers a calendar of his shiny space art. I will have one for my wall.







For graphic inspiration, I adore the bold, bright prints in this Paper Source Art Calendar.






Etsy of course has loads of beautiful and unique art calendars, particularly of the postcard desktop variety. I like this charming Jardin Desk Calendar by MagnoliaMoonlight.






And this Objectification II Postcard Desk Calendar by SureAsBlue.






And this Screen Printed Botanical Calendar by annacote.






And this Animals of the Land, Sky, and Sea Desk Calendar by InkDropDesign.






And this Helvetica Typography Calendar by ovendoorowl.






And this Letterpressed and Silkscreened Calendar by ilee.






And this TTV Desk Calendar by ebonypaws.






And this Polaroid Calendar by AliciaBlock.






I'm in love with the stationary company Cavallini & Co., particularly their calendar offerings. They have great vintage art themes like travel, maps, plants, and animals.







I also made a few finds in photography calendars of abandoned places. In the slightly surreal category, there's the beautiful Retrospect Calendar by farhmboy, who explores out-of-the-way locales in his native Michigan.







In more moody ruins, there's the uplifting Abandoned Places Calendar by Richard Rizzo.







Then there's the beautifully photographed tribute to that ever-photogenic ruin, the Eastern State Penitentiary Calendar by 13 Black Cats Designs.







So please...no calendars! Unless you've found some great ones, too.

Here there be trolls

Information Architects is the creator of the Web Trend Map series, the latest and greatest of which is Web Trend Map 3. (For the best view, try the adaptive Startpage.) Modeled on the Tokyo subway map, it envisions the web as a network of stations and exchanges linked by common lines like Technology, Video, eCommerce, and Politics.





Because they're still beautiful, here's the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0 (below), and the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 1.
Via Strange Maps.





Xkcd presents a Tolkien-style Map of Online Communities, which handily situates social groups along the axes of "pratical—intellectual" and "focus on real life—focus on web".





There's also xkcd's nifty Blogofractal, which helpfully distills all the output of the Internet and crystallizes it in visual format:





In more practical maps, this one at Strange Maps is a world map showing all of the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), weighted by population.





Here's another xkcd Map of the Internet showing the distribution of IP addresses.