Turn Tiles and Discover the World

Posted on May 29, 2013 by marleen

Do you know the website The Pop-Up City? They always share cool things (subsribe to their newsletter The Pop-Up City Daily, really!).

Today, their newsletter covers Strut: an app that gamifies travelling. Using the app while being on the move, you will turn tiles on a blurred map. The effect: more and more of the world will be visible, simply by you going places. After a while the app will show you what your radius of action is (how big, or maybe how small: take another route to get places!). Sweet! (iPhone only, no Android version yet)

Puzzle your World Views

Posted on May 18, 2013 by marleen

Mappy quizzes and puzzles are a great way to spend your weekend, and a very dangerous thing to get informed about just before going to bed (as I discovered yesterday evening). Figure out where you are on various Google Maps snapshots in GeoGuessr. Credits for GeoGuessr go to Anton Wallén. Make sure to check out the website, because this screenshot only give you a bit of an impression. And yes, it does give you an immediate idea of the exploration fun and you can imagine the addictiveness of this website. Go explore and enjoy!

Map Fun with Niemann

Posted on April 23, 2013 by marleen

You might already know some illustrations by Christoph Niemann: he also did this great stereotype map I’ve shown earlier this year. Niemann’s great illustrations have appeared on covers of The New Yorker, Time, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration, and he has won awards from AIGA, the Art Directors Club and The Lead Awards. Yesterday a friend of mine pointed me at these funny Google-esque maps. You should actually see them all (because almost every single one cracked me up). Abduzeedoo created a nice overview, so make sure to check them all out.

Mercator Project(ion)

Posted on February 8, 2013 by marleen

Did you know the Mercator projection on maps really messes up your idea about size? The cylindrical map projection of the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator (presented in 1569) is the standard map projection nowadays. While the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size and shape of large objects, as the scale increases from the Equator to the poles, where it becomes infinite. Get it? Well, check out this puzzle to understand the real impact of what you’ve just read. Impressive!

Map of your Life

Posted on December 19, 2012 by marleen

This one is not really cartographical but it did make me laugh out loud. Happy mapping with Poorly Drawn Lines:

Bullying Continents

Posted on October 1, 2012 by marleen

9GAG always provides you with funny moments and guaranteed laughs. Here’s one, happy mappy monday!

American Geography Lesson

Posted on May 22, 2012 by marleen

You can never see too many stereotyping maps if you like to laugh (I am stereotyping here, I know) so here is another great one from the website 9gag.com. This is how Americans see the world.

iPhone Case Closed

Posted on April 28, 2012 by marleen

Etsy.com is really filled with cool map items. Look at these great iPhone cases, love them! Do you too? Check ‘m here.

Where’s Waldo?

Posted on March 4, 2011 by marleen

Remember those books with pages filled with different sceneries where you had to spot the small figure with a hat, glasses and red-white striped clothes, listening to the name Waldo (Or in Dutch Waar is Wally)? Amazing how much fun I had with those. So I was überexcited when A. showed me the following website, thanks for that!

The website contains a player to practice your Where’s Waldo skills online, an app for your smartphone, and a webshop with Waldo merchandise. But also maps from Google Maps showing where Waldo was spotted or where Waldo Flashmobs took place. This is just one of those websites where you can perfectly spend some lost hours just wandering around. #TGIF!

A Moveable Feast

Posted on February 16, 2011 by marleen

Who says maps are static? Since we are no longer surprised by the idea of looking at a tiny screen of a navigation system instead of properly -and I must admit it is sometimes very unpractical- folding out a roadmap of France, the interactive use of maps no longer really shocks us. But still, once in a while it is nice to see an example of a real interactive map. Especially the following example, it is a very nice job done by Matthew Somerville. I might be one of the few who’s actually as much intrigued by it as I am, but I am convinced a lot people are at least amused by it. Just check it out for a while, I am sure that waiting for a train to arrive isn’t that bad anymore!

Click on the image to see The Real Thing, all yellow pins are trains moving around London!

Maps and the City

Maps & Design

Tag Archives: funny