Digital illustration Projects in ItalyDigital illustration Projects in ItalyAtlas of Forgotten Queens
Six queens. Six worlds. Countless untold stories.
History remembers kings. It often forgets queens.
The idea | Atlas of Forgotten Queens is an interactive visual-storytelling project that reimagines six historical women rulers — Zenobia, Nefertiti, Dihya, Tamara, Roxelana, and Artemisia I — through a symbolic, narrative-driven lens. Rooted in historical research across different cultures and eras, it focuses on influential women whose stories have been overlooked in traditional history.
The approach | Rather than presenting history as a fixed reconstruction, the project translates it into a layered visual language where meaning is suggested through imagery, atmosphere, and symbolism. It is at once an archive and a reinterpretation — each queen sits between documentation and imagination, a shifting image shaped by symbols, suggestion, and a subtle sense of myth.
The craft | Each queen is built as a digital collage combining photography, original illustration, and AI-generated imagery, fused into a single portrait that reads as historical identity reinterpreted, never literal reconstruction. Each queen's name is written in her own historical script — Egyptian hieroglyphs for Nefertiti, Tifinagh for Dihya, alongside Arabic, Georgian, and Greek — so that each ruler is named in her own writing, not only in ours.
The process and tools | The project was designed, prototyped, and built in Figma Make, used both through its AI-driven generation and its code editor for precise refinement — Figma Make is the spine that turns the concept into a living, interactive site. Around it sits a wider creative pipeline: Photoshop and Illustrator for visual development and the gold-line maps; Midjourney for image generation; Gemini to compose the original score "The Last Prayer of the Sultan"; and Claude to develop and structure the narrative. The result is a genuine multi-tool, AI-and-manual workflow, with Figma Make at its center.
The experience | The site unfolds like a museum. A soft, slowly drifting haze with floating, parallax collage elements gives way to a gallery of circular portraits; each queen's page reveals her in colour and invites the visitor to read symbolic hotspots placed directly on the artwork. The Geography of Silence gathers all six rulers onto a single map — where they ruled, and where memory let them fade. The Language of Emblems is the project's lexicon, collecting the recurring symbols — the hawk, the fox, the colour red — and reading them in their universal meaning: a key to the clues marked on each portrait. The journey closes with The Unwritten, where the names of other forgotten queens — Sheba, Amanirenas, Nzinga, Boudica, and more — surface and fade around a final illustration: an unfinished, ever-expanding tribute to the countless women still waiting to be remembered. The experience is fully responsive across desktop and mobile: on smaller screens it is rethought for touch rather than scaled down, with a collapsible menu, a pinch-to-zoom map, and enlarged tap targets.
If you've read all the way to here — thank you for your interest! 😊
Figma Site | https://atlasqueens.figma.site/
(https://atlasqueens.figma.site/)Share | https://www.figma.com/make/uXm8S9lkymkTd8URAjmj6C/ATLAS-OF-FORGOTTEN-QUEENS?p=f&t=twAEHRsb3gv3aWaI-0
Community | https://www.figma.com/community/file/1646095544450556274 "Shade" is a striking, avant-garde display typeface that leverages structural fragmentation and precision stencil cuts to create a distinct interplay of light and form. The vertical rhythm and geometric sharpness give it an industrial yet highly editorial edge.
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