This one’s a little bit meta. One of the central themes of this year-long experiment is simply that technology eventually overtakes us, and new ways of doing things become available. In cartography, this has always been the case. Many decades ago maps were committed to print through copperplate engraving where skilled engravers produced printing plates in reverse that were then inked and used to print maps. One characteristic of these maps was the ornate written elements and ornate borders and flourishes. Engravers were skilled craftsmen in their own rights and this was a way of showing their skills.

And so, with the development of lithography, and many subsequent forms of automated lettering the ornateness tended to die out, replaced by functional letterforms. And in terms of education students are recommended to keep type simple and legible, and to avoid ornate forms. Well, yes, maybe. But it’s rather a shame that ornate lettering has somewhat died out.

So I thought that today we’d ask AI to go back in time and use the most modern of image creation to prepare a map as if it were engraved. I simply asked it to recreate the fantastic Equal Earth map in an historical form as if the lettering had been engraved. It’s “okay”. I can guarantee that this same prompt made earlier in the year would have made an absolute mess of both the geography and the labels with most mis-spelt, and misplaced. There’s still a few problem areas on here but nothing a little re-prompting or editing in Photoshop wouldn’t solve.

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Could you create a political world map where each country name is a beautiful calligraphic style. The intent here is to create a map that has the appearance of an old copperplate engraved map with extremely ornate letterforms that demonstrate the art of the engraver. My suggestion is to use a well-known map as a starting point such as the Equal Earth Political map so you can ensure you get both the geography and labelling positionally accurate. No hallucinations!