Brain Pickings

LAxNYC: Creative Takes on a Cross-Country Road Trip

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Typographic travel, or what 4,129 miles have to do with the new art of lifestreaming.

More than four years ago, before time-lapse had become the exhausted animation cliché it is today, one guy lived every reluctant Los Angelano’s dream of escapism — he spent seven days driving from LA to New York — and compressed it in 4 brilliantly time-lapsed minutes.

Now, two French designers, Minh Anh Vo and Victor Schuft, better-known as PaperCut, are upping the creative ante on this very same premise. Last October, the duo left Los Angeles to move to New York, driving cross-country for two weeks straight. They covered 4,129 miles through 14 states, sending 94 postcards along the way.

Then, they created this beautiful typographically-driven visualization poster about the journey and the locations of the postcards, a neo-map of sorts.

A closer look:

Besides feeding our own dreams of escapism, the project is a wonderfully artful take on the now-familiar lifestreaming-and-personal-data-visualization movement. (Nick Felton, we’re looking at you.) We’d love to see more.

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