Earth

The Soul of the Earth: Live from the Australian Outback with Sébastien Cros

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On Tourmag, a promotional banner for Hurtigruten opens the page, immediately catching the eye with a distinct visual pull. The banner features a 350 by 345-pixel image that captures attention and sets the tone for a travel feature centered around exploration and sea journeys. Beside the banner, a nearly invisible tracking pixel operates in the background, silently counting impressions and helping the publication measure reader engagement without interrupting the user experience.

The layout of the article reflects a careful balance between striking visuals and readable typography. The design leans into a bold, legible aesthetic: a strong, high-contrast title sits atop a dark band, drawing the reader’s gaze with its white lettering against a black backdrop. The lead paragraph area—often described in layout notes as the chapeau—employs a warm gradient wash, transitioning from a soft, light amber to a deeper gold, and presents the opening ideas in a concise, centered block. This combination of font choices and color treatment lends the page a classic, travel-magazine feel while keeping the content accessible across devices.

Behind the scenes, a number of layout adjustments work together to ensure the article remains centered and readable on a variety of screens. The right-hand column is intentionally hidden on larger displays, a choice that prioritizes the main narrative and visuals. The main content region is stretched to occupy the available width, with a maximum width that provides ample room for imagery and text without sacrificing readability. On wider screens, the container is tuned so that the content remains visually balanced, avoiding overly wide lines and preserving comfortable line length for readers.

Within the body of the article, a separate element—the live Tourmag widget—appears as an embedded feature. This is delivered via an iframe that stretches across the available width, inviting readers to engage with live content hosted elsewhere. The embedded frame is designed to be responsive and unobtrusive, with a minimum height to ensure the feed is readable regardless of the device. The presence of this live feed adds an interactive dimension to the page, allowing readers to experience real-time updates alongside the static article content.

Towards the bottom of the structure, a prominent image anchors the visual story: a large photograph credited to Sébastien Cros for WeTravelAustralia. The image serves as a powerful visual punctuation mark, grounding the article’s narrative in a tangible moment captured by a seasoned photographer. The credit line—“© Sébastien Cros – WeTravelAustralia™”—appears in clear, respectful typography, acknowledging the photographer’s contribution and the source of the image.

Throughout the page, the design emphasizes clean typography and a restrained color palette, with deliberate decisions about spacing, margins, and image prominence to guide the reader’s eye. The result is a polished, magazine-like experience in which promotional content and editorial elements coexist harmoniously. The Hurtigruten banner opens the journey, the gradient chapeau draws the reader into the introduction, the live feed injects immediacy, and the concluding photograph leaves a lasting impression, all within a layout that remains accessible and aesthetically cohesive across devices.

In Vienna, a One-of-a-Kind Museum Reveals How People Long Imagined the Earth

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Our view of the world has continually evolved over the centuries, as a quirky museum in Austria attests. In the heart of Vienna, away from the crowds of usual tourist sites, there lies a unique museum on Earth. A gem for history buffs and lovers of maps, and sometimes even of the sky. Located in the Mollard Palace, the Globe Museum is indeed the only public institution wholly devoted to globes.

In this 17th-century setting, more than 220 rare and ancient spheres, most of which were crafted before 1850, are on display. “Globes attest to how our imagining of the planet has evolved. This is the only place in the world where you can see so many gathered together”, explains its director, Nikolaus Schobesberger, to the BBC, on Sunday, August 30.

A true mirror of bygone beliefs

The collection mainly tells how people over time tried to understand a world that remained largely unknown to them. Each globe records what people knew as well as what they did not know at the moment of its creation.

Some 16th-century globes show a North America that is lost among uncharted territories, when California isn’t depicted as an island state, an exaggerated Asia, or an imaginary southern continent in place of Australia and Antarctica. The oceans, meanwhile, are teeming with sea monsters or dragons, not with islands. On celestial globes, Renaissance astronomical observations still sit beside Pegasus, Perseus brandishing Medusa’s severed head, and other mythical creatures or figures.

Colonialism, space conquest…

Other pieces represent a colonial view of the world, with European flags planted on African coasts or caricatured representations of Indigenous peoples, transformed into cannibals. “They reflect the mindset of their time. They are certainly magnificent works of art, but we must also take into account the date of their creation”, notes Nikolaus Schobesberger.

One of the museum’s most fascinating objects is a lunar globe, created in 1961. The visible face of the Moon is meticulously drawn, but its far side is deliberately left white, because it had simply not yet been observed. Two years later, a new globe filled in that unknown portion. It also features a reproduction of the famous Martin Behaim globe, completed in 1492, which immortalizes a world without the Americas, but with an endless ocean separating Europe from Asia.

Initially reserved for princes and wealthy merchants, globes gradually became everyday objects, found in schools and households. In the era of Google Earth, they have not thankfully lost their power to fascinate. “It is not merely a scientific instrument, it is also an object that lets you dream of distant lands”, says the custodian of this place. For him, no other work of art stirs the imagination and the urge to discover distant places as much.

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