The Great Gatley - More beautiful illustrations from Owen Gatley

Last week, our Things section featured the latest publication from YCN, Ideas Illustrated, and examining the magazine’s beautiful pages our eyes were particularly drawn to the maps of New York, London, Copenhagen and Paris, as illustrated by Owen Gatley.

In 2010, we featured Gatley in our annual Graduates selection, and since then his already brilliant work has continued to go from strength to strength. These maps are among his most recently published work, and are engaging, playful, and very cleverly thought out. The distinctive moods and images of each city are conveyed by differences in palette and typography – soft pastels and slanted script for Paris, for example, and darker tones and a variety of of signpost-lettering for New York. The loosely evoked maps of each place, meanwhile, evoke the meandering or grid-like streets of each and provide a pleasant visual framework for the various architectural and cultural landmarks playfully spaced about each composition.

Gatley’s recent editorial work for The New York Times’ One Page Magazine, children’s magazine Anorak, and Heineken demonstrate a consistency of skill, humour, and stylistic variation; those little blue birds meeting, greeting, and sipping their pints definitely resemble some pub customers I know!