Guerrilla Cartography highlights the power of maps to inform, persuade and inspire.

“Everyone believes a map. No other narrative device—not story or song or historical treatise—is so readily accepted as true. We have come to accept the map as fact.”

So writes Darin Jensen in Water: An Atlas, a remarkable collection of maps with many ways to view water that was released in 2017.

The maps for this crowd-funded publication were contributed by cartographers and other researchers around the world via Guerrilla Cartography, an open collaboration Jensen founded to “widely promote the cartographic arts.” The group’s first project was Food: An Atlas, a milestone accomplishment in 2012.

Its latest production is Atlas in a Day: Migration, a stunning response to a challenge to research and design an atlas about migration in one day last October. No fewer than 43 maps “interpret the theme of migration in diverse ways, considering the movements of people, animals, climates, physical materials and cultural artifacts over time and space. Some of them represent the culmination of years of research on a critical topic; others are quick sketches inspired by current events and concerns.”

All three atlases can be downloaded free, and Food and Water can be bought as books.

Maps retain plenty of power in print, Jensen points out.

“Guerrilla Cartography is about letting story emerge from data and illustrating the story through the art of cartographic design,” he says. “We give voice to the talents of mapmakers who may have no other platform for a wide and printed distribution of their work and ideas.”