Alpes de France - vintage map

Are you planning a trip to the French Alps? Check out this vintage map first! I love the vintage illustration and information design it shows. It's highly decorative and would look great in a frame!

Autumn break in Luxembourg

It's autumn break in the northern parts of the Netherlands. Which means that a lot of people go on holiday. The Belgian Ardennes and Luxemburg are quite favorite destinations for a short break.

amongst the Dutch. This travel brochure is probably from the sixties.

Illustrations by Raymond Renard. 

London Undergrond map

I've blogged this one before. It actually was one of my first posts. But I thought I'd do a reblog. The first time I was in London - at the age of 16 - fell in love with the London Underground; the trains, stations, the roundel, the way signing, the typography and the font by Edward Johnston. But my special interest goes out to the London Undergrond map, the schematic diagram of lines. Information design at its best.

The map I have is from 1978 and if you're a little familiar with the map it's quite easy to see the style of the map hasn't changed much. 

The first diagrammatic map of London's tube was designed in 1931 by Harry Beck, an engineer. It was an uncommissioned spare-time project for him. His diagrammatic approach was groundbreaking and his design concept has been widely adopted for other network maps around the world. 

Encyclopedic glaciers, icebergs and the Alps

Oliver Jeffers - United airlines

Illustrations made for the United Airlines inflight magazine. They are all geographically accurate.

Check out Oliver Jeffers' website to discover all of his wonderful work.

North Sea flood of 1953

I grew up during the Cold War, but my parents have - naturally - different memories from their youth. World War II but also the North Sea Flood which occured in 1953. My parents had this book and I flipped through it once but it didn't really mean that much to me. Nowadays I can relate better. Floods or other disasters caused by nature always happen far away in other parts of the world. But it actually did happen in the Netherlands. More precisely, it happened in the part of the country I grew up in, the province of Zeeland. 

The other day I bought this book with the map in a thriftshop and had a was moved by the pictures. In a way it took me back to my fathers stories.

Quote from Wikipedia: 

The 1953 North Sea flood (Dutch, Watersnoodramp, literally "flood disaster") was a major flood caused by a heavy storm, that occurred on the night of Saturday 31 January 1953 and morning of 1 February 1953. The floods struck the Netherlands, Belgium, England and Scotland.

A combination of a high spring tide and a severe European windstorm caused a storm tide. In combination with a tidal surge of the North Sea the water level locally exceeded 5.6 metres (18.4 ft) above mean sea level. The flood and waves overwhelmed sea defences and caused extensive flooding. The Netherlands, a country that is partly located below mean sea level and relies heavily on sea defences, was mainly affected, recording 1,836 deaths. Most of these casualties occurred in the southern province of Zeeland. In England, 307 people were killed in the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk,Suffolk and Essex. 28 were killed in West Flanders, Belgium.