About the Studio

Cartouche Map Studio was founded in Portland, Oregon in 2011 on the belief that a map is one of the few pieces of wall art that can be genuinely, verifiably correct — and that correctness is worth protecting even when the commission is sentimental rather than technical.

Every commission, whether it’s a client’s actual property boundary or an invented island for a child’s bedroom wall, goes through the same discipline: real source data wherever real data exists, a plainly stated representative-fraction scale wherever a single honest scale is possible, and a clear note on the piece itself wherever it isn’t. The study of projections, scale, and survey accuracy is a formal discipline for a reason, and the studio treats its illustration work as an extension of that discipline rather than a departure from it.

The studio is a small team of illustrators and one full-time cartographic researcher, working from a shared drafting studio housed in a converted survey-instrument workshop — several of the old brass transits and drafting tools from the building’s original tenants remain on display in the studio.