Lockdown-friendly interactive & illustrated travel map of Munich

“Shining light on unique places still open and safe to visit during lockdown”

What it is about

Our project is a personally curated interactive illustrated map of unique places to go & things to do across Munich during times of lockdown, that we hope is pleasing to look at, fun to navigate, and enjoyable to read through. We arrived in a time where movement was quite restricted, we thought residents of Munich, both new arrivals like ourselves and long-time locals, could benefit from discovering new things to do, so we made it our mission to shine light on unique low risk places people can go regardless of lockdown level.

How we built it

We wanted to display at least a dozen main places to highlight in or close to Munich’s city centre. The places had to be relatively open, safe, and free to walk around. We chose them based on recommendations from friends & colleagues, as well as from the internet, and only included the ones we personally went to and enjoyed, and wrote about them. We decided to use Mapbox as it could be integrated nicely with HTML, CSS, and Javascript using Mapbox GL. We illustrated the icons using Adobe PhotoShop, and we used all of our own photographs in the blog sidebar.

Challenges we ran into

Our most obvious challenge was the constantly changing lockdown rules which narrowed down the locations we could include, more notable however was that this project was a first for us; none of us coming from strictly programming or design backgrounds.

What we're proud of

Despite all of our struggles we implemented everything we intended to in our initial outlines for the project. All our code works as intended & design-wise we achieved readability & coherence despite a relatively complex array of features.

What we learned

We learned how to implement cartographic design principles with our first interactive web map and in the process learned essential web development techniques from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, we also honed digital illustration techniques & general design principles, and practiced our creative writing with our blog post sidebar.

What's next

In the future we intend to tweak the game function so that each button includes an array of places. Aesthetically we intend to simplify the base map as some of the detail is unnecessary and a bit noisy, we also need to Implement mobile support, and some of the earlier made generic placeholder icons will be replaced with unique icons.