Mapping Taylor Swift's London Every year or so there is a travel department workshop to brainstorm unique new titles. There are usually some amazing ideas amongst the repeating title suggestions (many of which clearly should have been published years ago), this one however was a treat. What is trending? Well, in the late summer of 2024 you couldn't move for Taylor Swift , her Eras Tour was hitting the UK hard and one of the editors, Sarah Allen, (a strong contender as the office go-to for all things Taylor), put forward the idea for a small gift book about the singer and her connections with London. The initial department enthusiasm was matched by the senior teams, and then, most critically, by the marketing team. It was assessed, costed and approved, meaning Sarah could take the reins. When dealing with popular culture there is a demanding schedule. It takes months to create a book, months to print and ship from the printers (in China for this title) and then weeks to distribute for publication. To catch the trending wave this book needed to be sent to print in record time, something larger publishers sometimes struggle with. Despite this urgency, there is always a slight delay while things start gearing up and it was not until a week or so later that I was brought in after it was confirmed the book needed to have maps. ✶ The initial discussion around the book had been simple enough, a 'nice map' which showed all the relevant Taylor Swift sights. As the project moved on it was up in the air if there was to be a geographical sub-division which would all need their own area maps, and would there be a further afield map? The answer to all these questions depended on the locations being selected. While the sights were being researched I awaited the first moodboards from the design team that would give direction to the title. I created a personal mood board and tried to bring the idea of sketched, distressed linework to these maps. I wanted to link the cartography to old fanzines, autograph books and joy filled teenage fanaticism. As much as I would love to have created the whole thing using a Sharpie and a Xerox machine to echo the punk zines such as Punk Planet and Maximum RockNRoll, it really was the wrong audience.

Mapping the Camino de Santiago 

Building a playlist for a road trip Midway through the Route 66 project, the senior designer put forward the great suggestion to include a Spotify playlist for the route. With music being such an integral part of long, cross-country drives this was immediately loved by all working on the book. I began to assemble a song list to 'stress test' the idea, mainly to see exactly what the music could be and how we could best share it. In the distant past a journey crossing the continent would have been at the mercy of AM radio - aided by all its crackles and interference. It wasn’t until the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s that the superior FM radio frequencies were opened up but these had short range and were found only in larger urban areas. Cassettes, CDs and iPods took the weight until the early 2010s when SiriusXM brought satellites to the car. Now it’s more likely a smart phone will be connected to an online and near infinite library. What is missed is the experience of the unpredictable, you never knew what was coming next and when a song was played it was for that moment, not to be rewound. It was music chosen by somebody else from a different part of the country with differing experiences and tastes. No wonder the good radio stations and DJs had such loyal followers, islands amidst the talk and religious programming. We wanted to become a radio station for the journey

Route 66: How We Made the Maps

A cover image of Ultimate Japan published by DK