Minimalist, modular map and inset depicting the city of Rudky, located in the west of Ukraine about 20 miles from the Polish border.

These map pieces were made for personal historian Dawn Roode’s Modern Heirloom Books. Modern Heirloom works with individuals, families, and family-run businesses to privately custom-publish books preserving their stories. The maps will be part of a deluxe memoir about a Holocaust survivor and his daughter’s efforts to tell his story, part of which documents her visit to Rudky in 2019.

My task was to create a 10″ x 10″ vector base map, for use in both overview and inset pieces, showing Rudky’s main street grid with selected roads and landmarks. Numerical labels reference photos, snapshots, and other archival imagery that (at one stage) were to appear alongside the map, but soon became positioned in other places throughout the book

The images shown here mock up the three pieces (overview map, inset map, and legend) into two separate example configurations. I worked with existing styles—typography, color palette, iconography—already in use throughout the book’s in-progress layout.

Digital: Full-color, branded, print-ready digital PDF versions