As per my usual modus operandi, here’s two versions of a little something I made for no other reason than love:
It’s a very large poster — 24″ × 36″, in fact. So, I recommend clicking those images to browse around the PDF versions. Or just look at this quick pair of detail images, instead:
Notes on the Design
- A few people have asked me if this poster shows all of the islands in the Great Lakes. The answer is no. There are roughly 35,000 others which I did not have space to include. I have shown the largest.
- They’re not quite in order of size. I did a little shuffling within rows, to help things look a little more visually even.
- There’s some room to quibble over what is an island in the Great Lakes. Wolfe Island is at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River as it enters Lake Ontario. Walpole Island is formed by the delta of the Saint Clair River, and in any case isn’t on one of the five Great Lakes proper. I erred on the side of inclusion.
- Despite that inclusive stance, I did not include Copper Island, which owes its island-ness to a canal.
- I love the three stages of waterline perception on the Classic version. From far enough away, it looks like a simple stroke around the islands. As you get closer, it looks like a shadow, instead. And closer still, you can see the parallel waterlines.
- I started out with a very minimal design concept in my mind, then quickly started loading it up with unnecessary stuff. “Hey, what if I add towns, roads, parks, rivers, etc.?” Then I slowly, and thankfully, started dropping each of these elements, sometimes because it seemed like a big hassle, and sometimes because colleagues urged me to keep it simple and clean. Which was the entire point, as I had forgotten.
- Lake Erie does have islands, but the largest, Pelee, was just a bit too small to make the cut. Perhaps I’ll someday do a “Part 2” poster, featuring the next group of islands in the size sequence.
- I used Adobe Caslon for the Classy version because I knew it had great swashes.
- I used Mostra Nuova for the Urban version because I paid too much for those fonts to not use them in every single project.
- I used CanVec 250k data for Canada, and for the US I used TIGER/Line data that I simplified to match the Canada data.
- Fun/annoying fact: I could not easily obtain land polygons, so I used waterbody polygons instead, then inverted everything to get land shapes.
As per usual, I’m putting these up on Zazzle, in case you are in the extremely small group of people who want to pay money for something like this (if you’re curious, I usually get zero sales from these projects, but I’m not really in it for the money so it doesn’t much matter). Or you can just go grab a PDF above and print one out yourself.
somethingaboutmaps 
These are so incredible. Growing up near Lake Michigan, I always fantasized about exploring the islands of the Great Lakes. I’m going to print this for my office and get lost in those fantasies when work gets overwhelming. You truly have a gift.