Things I made while offline: The Map

Because this blog will be dominated by football-related content for the next five months, your author has decided to make an effort to regularly post pictures his lovely and talented sister took of some of his artwork. These posts will include a brief thought or two about when the piece was made. 

This week: An ink map of the route from my home (at the time) to art class 

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT IT: This was an assignment from 1997 in which everybody was to try and make a map that showed how they got to class each morning. I think what fascinates me most about it now would be how little there used to be along that route I took, but as things have expanded west of Chicago here in the more than a decade since, there's obviously been quite a bit of development on the main road (Randall) in that time.

I think my favorite parts of the piece itself would probably be the two spots to look out for speed traps and the places I burned holes into the map.

WHAT STILL KINDA BUGS ME ABOUT IT: I thought using the logo for the Target store located in that upper-right part of the map was somewhat misleading, as though it could be misinterpreted as the destination. Then I noticed that on the Google Maps, Target's bull's-eye is actually on their maps too:

What most bothers me would probably be a couple spots on the map where I can't clearly decipher what I was intending was located there. The two that stand out have to be that gap-toothed-looking smile thing (maybe?) in the upper-left just over the railroad tracks (a dentist's office, at the time, I presume?), and whatever is in the lower-right quadrant of that four-part series of frustrations caused by taking Route 31 on the bottom of the map (which, going clockwise from the lower left is an angry face, bumper-to-bumper, and red lights before who knows what).

I should also mention that I rarely ever took the Route 64 path to Randall Road I used for this map, but included it simply as an excuse to add more symbols for businesses on that side of the project.

The only other thing I dislike is to recall how I used actually be able to make it from my house to the community college in just over 10 minutes on a good day (of course, at some spots on Randall Road, my speed would actually approach triple digits on the speedometer), but with all the new lights and increased traffic these days, such a short trip is an utter impossibility.