“Introducing Walk There! Metro’s new guide to great places to walk in the Portland-Vancouver area. The book will lead you on 50 explorations of newly acquired urban natural areas, scenic parks, historic neighborhoods and fascinating main streets. Detailed maps and route descriptions will help you discover the region’s rich history and varied landscapes while you enjoy the benefits of walking.

Walking is one of the easiest and most effective activities you can do to tighten your wallet and your waistline. If you drive less, you save more by avoiding the costs of gasoline and parking. Walking is one of the safest activities you can do to maintain your health. Mile for mile you burn as many calories walking as you would jogging, but with far less stress on your joints. Walking also helps the environment. You can reduce your carbon footprint by shifting short trips from your car to your feet.

Metro developed the new guide in partnership with local governments and community groups and with support from Kaiser Permanente. The book will be distributed through health education classes and community walking events and programs. The 50 walking route maps and descriptions are available in a pocket-sized book or for download…”

The culmination of a tremendous effort by a wide-ranging team, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to design the walking maps in this guide.

Downtown Portland
The Pearl
Northwest/Nob Hill & the Pearl

While these maps may seem detailed, there is also a comprehensive map which stitches all those together and is even more detailed, as this small snippet shows:

This super-sized map is not online as I am reserving it for paying customers. The average person couldn’t even print it at home anyway, as it takes a printer that can handle paper that is 36 inches wide by 48 inches tall. The map is well suited for use as a wall poster in a hotel, visitor center, gallery or building lobby.

Some of the features of this map series include:

1. Each type of establishment has a unique, iconic shape and color
2. Business locations are super easy to find using block numbers
3. Specific places are identified by a unique acronym, reducing confusion
4. An index lists all establishments in a district alphabetically within a category
5. First Thursday participants are emphasized using an orange outline–so it’s easy to spot them on the map and in the index.
6. Public art is identified, as are parks, mass transit, and parking.
7. The street grid is accurately shown, so walkers won’t be surprised by the distances between locations.

Any given icon and its associated label/acronym is unique throughout the system. This requires a namespace large enough to accommodate quite a few establishments. Each district has its own range of block numbers.

All in all, I really like Klavika for a city map such as this. Would I use it for a map of Seattle, LA or San Jose? I’m not sure… at some scale of city, the lack of a condensed version of the typeface would be felt more keenly.

From across the lobby of the San Francisco Business District Hilton, the map looks like it is one giant sheet of glass, twelve feet wide by six feet tall. Diffuse backlighting illuminates the grid of streets and neighborhoods and color coded tourist attractions. The result is an informational display which attains a level of elegance and beauty rarely seen in commercial interiors.

The architecture firm Gensler did the design for the renovation of this landmark hotel across from the TransAmerica tower. Pulp Studio in LA took the digital files I designed and fabricated them into this amazing display, along with Hayward Glass. Cahill Contractors coordinated the integration of the many different groups working together.

Making the map took months of non-stop effort. I gathered every bit of information on the city that I could find. Three different stylistic treatments were created for the customer to choose from. We had meetings in the under-construction hotel to reach a consensus on map size, extent, style, features, and many other factors. The architect’s renderings were discussed. Many geo-spatial datasets were downloaded. Finally the map design was developed in Adobe Illustrator, sweating the details of every city block, park and pier in San Francisco. Many proof prints were made, which were a bit unwieldy as they were life-size or near life-size. The final file had to be split into three sections to match the panels that would be printed by Pulp Studios.

For more photos of this map, see the Art of Geography Cartography pages. The hotel showcases the map on their website in the interior section.

How is the map physically made? It is actually three panels printed on thin plastic sheets and sandwiched between two layers of glass, and backlit with diffuse lighting. The glass panels are held in place by a super-strong metal framework. The panels are so seamlessly joined that you have to be very close to be able to notice them (in the above close-up photo you can see a slight shadow off to the side where there is a seam. However when you are looking at it straight on, it is much less visible).

Glass is an ideal surface for an environment like this which receives a lot of wear and tear from people pointing to places on the map. At the end of the day, the only thing necessary to restore the map to like new condition is a wipe with a cloth.

There is some slight bowing of straight lines (distortion) in the above photos due to using a wide-angle lens for these shots.

The final style treatment used Futura as the typeface. To see the kind of work that went into preparing alternative treatments, here is the mock-up of a section of the map using Klavika and a different color palette where landmark buildings are orange, and shopping districts purple:

One of the key decisions was how much of the city to show. While it would have been great to show the entire city limits, the bottom edge ended up cropping the city just below the Mission. The form factor was guided by the fact that the top of the map needed to be no higher than about six feet tall. Other factors included where the critical mass of attractions were, and a block size such that individual buildings could be highlighted and named. I think a reasonable balance was chosen. Another design challenge was the longevity of the map — we wanted as much of the map as possible to remain viable over at least ten years. That meant shifting the focus somewhat from a printed map which might be updated every other year.

So I put it to use in the Art of Geography logo.

Many people have commented on the logo… I thought it would be interesting to delve into this unusual projection/map. The following article explains more about Leonardo da Vinci’s octant map and projection:

http://www.artofgeography.com/info/octant-projection.html

(Via The Mac Observer.)

Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by
showing you in real time how people with common color vision deficiencies
will see your maps and graphics. Color Oracle applies a full screen color
filter to art you are designing ˆ independently of the software that you
are using.

Seeing is believing! Instantaneously identify and correct problem colors
in your art using Color Oracle’s system-wide menu and keyboard shortcuts
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(Via Real World Illustrator.)