
City map designer software#
No design software or coding required it’s the Instagram of map design!įinally, allow us to leave you with this utterly addicting geography quiz game,. They’ve even developed a tool called Map Stack, that allows users to design their own maps by stacking different layers and filters. On this page, you can view any location in the world, toggling between a “toner” rendering, watercolor or “terrain”: Stamen is big on changing not only the way we use maps, but how maps aesthetically look.

They’re constantly developing innovative, unusual maps to visualize information from the locations of Pinterest Pins to the vulnerability of coastal areas under flood conditions: Stamen Design, a San Francisco-based design and research group, certainly has some of the best map geeks out there.
City map designer series#
Maps - deconstructed! This artist took a series of maps, abstracted them into blocks of land divided by streets, and then linearly reordered those blocks according to shape and size, giving a very different sense of a city’s space. Usually maps prize elements like roads and highways over topographic features like elevation. This digital artist approaches Milan from a somewhat similar angle, adding a funky color scheme. The abstract lines may not correspond to Munich’s streets and alleys in an exact or even literal manner, but the overall aesthetic logic of maps is certainly here. It’s a painting by artist Lu Xinjian, inspired by Google Earth aerial views of Munich, Germany. This one, however, nevertheless demonstrates an interesting tenet: instead of placing street names within the boundaries of the street, using the line of text in a street name to represent the street itself!Īn aerial view of Munich, in the eyes of Lu Xinjian Usually they’re more decorative posters than actually functional maps. Typographic maps are quite a trend these days. This topographic map does the opposite, keeping the land flat while charting the depths of Lake Huron.

Usually maps are flat, and if they aren’t, they depict land-based topographies like hills and mountains. Here are a few other examples of awesome, mind-bending map designs, some of which alter fundamental mapping principles like the above, others of which make small but nevertheless significant changes. Part of BERG’s “Here and There” Project looking uptown from 3rd and 7th (in Manhattan)ĭesigned by BERG, this map upends the convention that a map should present a bird’s-eye view, instead creating a warp that allows both an aerial and street-level perspective at once. For an extreme example, take a look at this map of New York City facing uptown from Cooper Union:

And it is ultimately up to the designer to decide what sort of instructions a map gives in this regard.
City map designer how to#
They don’t just show you a place they show you how to look at a place. Rather, they are highly conceptually loaded material. Like this one:Ī b eautiful aerial rendering of San Diego, by Jan Kallwejtīut maps are usually more than just pictures with manipulable aesthetic characteristics. In consequence, the world has no shortage of gorgeous, artistic maps created by graphic designers in their down time. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that maps would possess a special allure for the more spatially conscious among us. If you read through interviews with famous graphic designers, you may come across an interesting commonality: many of them profess to loving maps since childhood.
