If you don’t already know about Herb Lester, you should. The company was started by Ben Olins and Jane Smillie in 2010. They started out designing and printing beautifully illustrated and curated city guides to London that are filled with information on spots you wish a wise friend would tell you about, the best pubs, coffee shops, book stores, or places to take a kid if you have one on your hands for a day. Recently they’ve expanded the travel guides to include other cities, stationery, and traveler’s accessories.
I spotted their work in London a few years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since, so it was great to get an e-mail from Jane asking if I’d like to work on a map with them. They had the idea to make a map of the solar system, one that would include must-see spots from popular science fiction books and films combined with hard facts about the environments the intrepid traveler will encounter. The novelist Matthew De Abaitua wrote the text and my job was to fit everything into the map, in the correct spots.
