Journal
[ Journal ]
We have built these for Metallica and for Elton John. They look simple. The interesting decisions are all underneath.
Usually one of three things. A dates map, showing where an act is playing and letting you find your city. A history map, plotting a career across places and years. Or a place map — a city seen through one artist's life in it, which is what we built around Elton John's Los Angeles.
They share a shape: geography, a set of points, and something worth reading at each point. What separates a good one from a novelty is entirely the third part.
The map is a few days of work. Getting a clean, verified dataset is most of the schedule. For a career-spanning map that means dates, venues, cities and coordinates, reconciled against an archive that will disagree with itself — venues get renamed, cities get annexed, two sources will give you different nights for the same show.
Decide early who arbitrates. On the archive work we do, someone on the artist's side has to be the final word on what is true, or the project stalls in a loop of polite corrections. Budget their time, not just yours.
Three practical options. A commercial tile provider such as Google or Mapbox gives you the most polish and a per-load bill that scales with success — fine for a campaign, uncomfortable for something permanent that goes viral. OpenStreetMap tiles you host yourself cost nothing per view but need styling work to stop looking like a utility. Or you skip live tiles entirely and draw an illustrated map, which is more expensive up front, has no running cost, and is the only route to something that actually looks like the artist.
Check the licence terms before you fall in love with a look. Most commercial providers require their attribution to stay visible and restrict taking static exports for print — which matters the moment someone wants the map on a poster.
A map with a few hundred pins will stutter on a mid-range phone if every pin is a DOM element with its own shadow. Cluster at low zoom, render pins to canvas when the count climbs, and load the detail for a point only when it is opened. Most of the audience is on a phone, on mobile data, with one hand, possibly at a gig.
Set a budget in numbers before you start — an interaction that responds within about a tenth of a second, a first view under two seconds on a mid-tier device — and test on real hardware rather than a throttled desktop.
Roughly: a third on data preparation, a third on the interface and interaction, a third on the content at each point — writing, image clearance, video cuts. The mapping technology itself is rarely the expensive part, which surprises people.
The cost that gets missed is the one after launch. Every new leg of a tour is a data update. Agree who does that and how, or the map is accurate for a month and embarrassing by autumn.
If you have fewer than about thirty points, a well-designed list beats a map and takes a fraction of the time. If the points are not interesting individually, a map only makes that more obvious — geography is a way of organising good content, not a substitute for it. And if there is no plan to maintain it, build the list.
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