Maps Maps Maps: Part 1

17 Aug 2023

There’s something fascinating about maps. I particularly love how they have this kind of fractal level of detail as you zoom in and out. Look at this one, I really like the minimalist black and white design.

These black and white map tiles are from Stamen design, essentially a really nice style sheet on top of © OpenStreetMap contributor data. The rest are OS Maps from the National Library of Scotland. The viewer is leaflet.js.

In related news, my excellent co-working space / carpentry workshop / pottery studio currently has a massive laser cutter which we may or may not keep for the long term.

The laser cutter can do either a raster or vector. Here is a raster into some birch plywood. They're 10cm square with slightly different settings.

Given the laser cutter is so massive I thought it might be fun to try to produce a huge map. There’s a spot at the top of the stairs in our flat that I think could be nice for it. My partner and I have always always lived somewhere in this vertical strip of london so the tall thin shape has some significance.

A blender render of what it might look like based on a 3D scan of my flat. This took all my very rudimentary new blender skills to put together.

Given how long those took to cut, I’m thinking that I’ll split the design into multiple panels so I don’t have to babysit the laser cutter for 24 hours.

Here's a 3D version. I got the scan with the lidar scanner on an ipad.

Let’s see how that pans out next time!