"Paper maps decorate the walls of offices at Google Maps, and even the Director of Google Maps, Manik Gupta, goes out of his way to print out paper maps when he travels. They can be folded into his pocket and handed to taxi drivers. Bill Rankin, cartographer and Yale professor, says that there is something about having a paper map on the wall to look at."
The image below is a folded-style map I created that was flattened, laminated, and used as a 21" X 34" wall poster. It covers a large geographic area in central New Hampshire called the White Mountains. Eight small communities are shown in the scene as enlarged insets with businesses labeled for identification to visitors. This map was intentionally drawn with whimsical scenes of wildlife, recreation, and landmarks that are characteristic to the area. Sometimes things are hidden on the map. In this case, because the area is renowned for covered bridges, there are ten such bridges located around the map for viewers to try to find. When the audience interacts with the map more sponsors are seen and visual impressions increase. Hard copy maps are collected by many as keepsakes to help trigger an enjoyable memory.
The map features is a small community about 20 miles outside of a large metropolitan area. They have a variety of offerings for the tourists and needed a colorful way to show, at a glance, the wide range of activities available to draw visitors to their area.
This 11"X 17" two sided map (available in padded tear-sheets at a variety of local businesses and the visitor center and also in online digital form) features a large area map showing the extended countryside for context. The reverse side contains a directory of businesses – color coded by industry and cross referenced with coordinates located on the map's border, and a detail map of the core downtown area.
Below is a simplified map of an urban area showing the various neighborhood playgrounds around the city. The art was used as a double truck layout to accompany a recreation article in a local lifestyle magazine. The blank bubbles were used by the client to insert addresses and additional information about each playground depicted (second photo below).
A real estate company that services a neighborhood within the metropolitan area of Seattle wanted a visitor/newcomer map of the main business district in the vicinity of their office. It exaggerates size as it features the three-block commercial area in relationship to downtown Seattle, the Puget Sound, and some nearby neighborhoods and landmarks.
"Any decent edition of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy also includes maps covering Frodo and his fellow traveller’s epic journey through Middle Earth.
More recently the practice was followed by George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series that spurred the very successful Game of Thrones TV series.
These great storytellers all realized the importance of how maps could help them in their story telling, to help readers understand complex events in a world unfamiliar to them."
Norfolk Virginia (above): It's an area loaded with history and things to do. I did not realize this in my younger years in the Navy when I spent a week in Norfolk aboard a visiting destroyer. In fact it was downright boring. But I had a chance to go back a couple decades later and a make a map (also of Virginia Beach, not shown) to let others know it's not a bad place to visit. This map had display advertising on the reverse side paid for by advertisers who wanted extra exposure. This map is also shown before labels were added as you see on most of the other maps.
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