The Logo
The Museum of Atlases logo above is composed of three elements: an open blue frame, a red vertical stroke and a blue curve.
Read as a book, the frame is the cover of an upright atlas. The red stroke marks the joint beside the spine, while the blue curve suggests a fragment of the Earth printed on the cover. Large-format atlases are commonly issued in hardcover, and the joint is part of the binding. The mark can also be read as an open door: the frame becomes the doorway, the red stroke suggests the exposed edge of the door, and the blue curve offers a glimpse of the Earth beyond the threshold. Because the curve never closes into a globe, the world seems to continue outside the mark. To open an atlas is also to open a door onto the world.
Near the base, the red stroke and the blue curve draw close without touching. Their near-meeting has a faintly botanical quality, at times resembling the stem and unfurling leaf of an orchid. The resemblance is easy to miss, but it gives the otherwise geometric mark a quiet liveliness. Small gaps separate the elements and keep the form open. With the lettering in place, navy and grey predominate. Red supplies the only warm accent, set against an off-white ground close to the natural colour of paper. The English lettering is tall and condensed; the Chinese is set in a clean, modern sans serif. Despite their different proportions, the two scripts sit comfortably together. In the bilingual version, the mark stands between the English and Chinese names; in the monolingual versions, it precedes the name, with its proportions, colours and internal spacing unchanged.
The English subtitle, Vestiges of the Delineated Earth, is formal and reflective in tone, evoking the long tradition of cartography. The Chinese subtitle, which may be rendered as “the imprint of the Earth between the pages”, turns instead to the atlas as a physical object: a record of an age, bearing traces of both its printing and its passage from hand to hand. The two subtitles are companions rather than literal translations. One looks back to the history of depicting the Earth; the other to the paper on which those depictions remain.