“Provide us with a printed map!” was a common piece of feedback after the inaugural Lake Oswego Open Studios event in 2023. So in 2024, as a board member who had always harbored a strange desire to design a map, I volunteered to take on this project. In addition to meeting the content requirements determined by the board as a whole, I had two design goals of my own: to “stretch” the geographic scale in a way that helped spread the individual tour stops out more evenly (avoiding the need for insets for denser areas while minimizing some of the areas home to fewer studios), and to weave in local landmarks in a way that added a sense of whimsy and made the map more meaningful to participating artists and their visitors.
While the illustrated map represented the lion’s share of the work for this project, it was just one side of a two-sided brochure, so I also designed (and in many cases, wrote and edited) the content for the other side, basing the palette on the existing logo and brand.
