Bratislav Milenković Maps the Bond Market for Fortune

There’s a category of editorial illustration that functions more like a map. The explainer asks an illustrator to absorb an entire subject and compress it into a single image parseable in seconds. For Fortune’s “Bonds 101” feature, the magazine commissioned Belgrade-based Bratislav Milenković to illustrate the entire bond market in a single image.

The resulting illustration holds together through a winding, dotted pathway, like a board-game trail connecting each bond type to the investor at the center.

Milenković uses thin, consistent-weight outlines to define every shape, filled with flat color and layered into dense but readable compositions. Everything exists at the same level of visual importance when an outline has no weight variation. There’s no built-in hierarchy in the drawing itself, so the winding pathway creates one, guiding the viewer through the composition.

You can look at this image before reading a word of the article and already begin to understand that the bond market is a space with distinct regions, each with its own logic and its own risks.

An explainer illustration gives the reader a path through unfamiliar territory. The illustrator is organizing information, establishing hierarchy and making a complex subject approachable.