For Scholastic 's "My Name is America" faux diary, The Journal of C.J. Jackson, I was asked to create a Depression Era road map highlighting the travel of the protagonist from Jefferson City to Santa Monica. For reference, I bought a vintage road atlas on EBay, the kind my grandparents might have used when they emigrated from tenant farmer Missouri to apple tramp Washington in 1937.

My reference atlas detailed the pre-freeway area American roads system, a crazy-quilt of asphalt, brick, concrete, macadam, gravel, stone, shell, sand-clay, smooth dirt, drained dirt, sand, and just plain dirt. I deleted some of these micro-variants and other details, but reproduced the essentials of iconography, patriotic coloring and deco graphics in the era before interstate highways could double as B-52 landing strips. The flip side is a recreation of a period embossed faux-leather atlas cover. The project was executed in Illustrator and Photoshop.