Cartography · Studio

The Butter Line

A map of Italy, with it's terrain shown as a series of bottomless triangles (like the caret symbol). A line cuts across north of Tuscany, south of Emilia-Romagna that extends to the edges of the image. To the right of the, and above this line is the title: 'The Butter Line' and below the following text: 'North of this line butter is the preferred cooking fat, to the south it is olive oil' Butter and olive oil are underlined and in bold. At the bottom left are the image credits: 'by:tlohde | tlohde.com | cartography.studio Produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 Made with Natural Earth & The Classic Food of Northern Italy, by Anna del Conte'. The colour background is buttery yellow and the text, and symbols are all a slightly burnt buttery yellow. The font is Tangerine, a flowy cursive font.
The Butter Line: The bottom line is: I do like butter. A lot. I also like olive oil. A lot.
projectionUTM Zone 32N
toolsQGIS, Inkscape
dataBorder from Natural Earth; Elevation data from Copernicus WorldDEM-30; Butter line drawn by hand from a description in The Classic Food of Northern Italy by Anna del Conte
fontTangerine by Toshi Omagari
commentsquite like this, I think the butter line should perhaps be a touch thicker. The mountains were drawn by throwing down a 25 km hexgrid and calculating the standard deviation of elevations within each grid, then using natural breaks to create 7 classes of standard deviations. Hid the first two, and symbolised each hex centroid with a loving hand drawn bottomless triangle svg, scaled by the elevation std. Not sure I like all the empty space in the lower right, Or how the mountains overlap the northern border. Might do another version with other country borders shown, and perhaps the sea also included
date02/11/2026