Chimborazo!

Background

first learned of this word in the TEDTalk by Rives. In that talk he presents his modern version of the encyclopedia game, following link after link in Wikipedia to all sorts of new and wonderful discoveries. He stumbles upon the page for a mountain in Ecuador called “Chimborazo” and the word to him is an exclamation of discovery "like eureka! and bingo! had a baby" - a great starting point for an adventurous lettering piece!

Sketches

Once I started sketching, I quickly settled on using a badge shape, to evoke the adventure of mountain climbing, and to include a stylized drawing of the mountain. For the letters I chose a suitable bold and solid letter. After all, this is all about mountains and discoveries and exclamations!

Digitization

The master design was scanned at 600dpi, then digitally cleaned and converted to a vector illustration, keeping the roughness of the handmade design while correcting and cleaning up some irregularities.

Final artwork

The cleaned up vectors were colored in the official colors of the Ecuadorean flag. I also converted the piece to a black/white version to use on colored pictures like the vintage map below (can you spot Chimborazo on the map?).

Lastly, because the Earth has a slight bulge around the equator, the top of the mountain is the farthest point on the planet from the center of the Earth. I bet you didn’t know that - Chimborazo!