Plug in! Michael Romanowicz’s Outlet Atlas is a gorgeously designed guide to power adapters and outlet types

Everyone has their interests, from the weird and niche to the common and shareable. For Michael Romanowicz, the Philadelphia-based designer who runs Den Outdoors, a prefab building company, his interest is very special. It’s something that we see everyday: the outlet. Yes! The outlet and its corresponding plug, those typically two to three-pronged voltage supplies available in just about every single modern building.

When Michael was travelling three or four years ago, he found himself constantly looking for basic information on power adapters and outlet types. But what he found was that every site was so plain, “SEO-optimised stuff with zero visual appeal or real value.” So Michael got thinking, conceptualising a distinct creative vision for a criminally overlooked archive of outlets, an atlas if you will. It would include big plug graphics, useful information, proper art direction. And now it’s here.

Outlet Atlas is a lovingly researched and elegantly designed online catalogue of the power outlets and plug standards used across the globe. While using Claude to update presentation decks for his company DEN Outdoors, Michael was struck by the quality of the output and began experimenting with the Outlet Atlas concept. Built as a love letter to travel, design culture and the open web, this project is more than design about the appliances of everyday regiments, but also the definitive global resource for understanding which power adapter you need.

Funnily enough, Michael tested the site out with others who have an expansive and highly documented interest: map enthusiasts on Reddit. With some feedback, he continued to shape the personal project fueled by a love for travel and design. “As a designer, you build up a graveyard of ideas over the years, and digging this one up and bringing it back to life was incredibly cathartic. I still believe the web and the browser are an important medium. They can carry real ideas, which is why I chose to ship this as a website rather than, say, just an Instagram account,” says Michael, although there is an account for the community submission side of things.

Josef Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems was an important book for Michael when he began software design in his early days, and its sensibility is woven through the whole project. There’s plenty of clarity, rigour and respect for the reader, placing ultimate legibility above all with handsome graphics that sometimes even make the accidental faces of outlets look like charming, minimalistic emojis. “I’ve always been a usability and product designer, and functionality and utility are almost always present in my work. It’s really hard for me to imagine things that are beautiful just for beauty’s sake. I’m not that type of designer. The expressions I make, I want them to be useful to other people,” says Michael. “But what really gets me excited is giving someone something they use every day, like a good bottle opener. That’s the bar I hold myself to, and Outlet Atlas is built in that spirit: something genuinely useful, made with real care.”

The end goal is simple for Michael, he’d like people to submit photos of outlets in the wild via Instagram and he’ll periodically update the site with them. As well as that, he hopes that someone Googles ‘what power adapter do I need?’, the first page result will be Outlet Atlas. “And the most beautiful one too,” adds Michael.