Metropolitan World Atlas

Designer Joost Grootens specializes in atlases, borrowing many of the conventions of traditional mapping books, including statistics about population, history, and climate, to work with authors on range of subjects from new urban districts in the Netherlands to the production and distribution chains of the books he designs. To activate the user’s engagement with the places depicted in the atlas, Grootens includes custom graphics and symbols, dynamic color schemes, layouts, and photography. Metropolitan World Atlas, for example, analyses 101 urban centers with a standard set of graphics that allow the reader to make visual comparisons among data sets on each city, including air pollution levels and data trac. In Atlas of the Conflict, information about resources, infrastructure, and borders take on a special gravity as they speak to the many facts, both mundane and complex, that underlie the ongoing struggle in the Middle East.