Topographic Pleasures

Fifty states drawn the way Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures cover drew a pulsar: one line per latitude, lifted by the land beneath it.

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The SVG is the drawing as shown. The PDF is one page, 35 cm wide, with the same vector lines.

Elevation is the USGS/NGA GMTED2010 30 arc-second grid; outlines are the US Census Bureau's 1:500,000 cartographic boundaries. Both are public domain. The lines are drawn from north to south and each one hides what lies behind it, as on Peter Saville's 1979 sleeve, which reproduced Harold Craft's plot of the pulsar CP 1919.

A Geodynamics Liberation Front project. Source and build instructions on GitHub.