Almost one year ago,
a tweet from
Newley Purnell pointed me to the maps designed by
Ork posters. Since they only cover cities in the US, I tried my luck and applied to the map of Bangkok. These maps are nothing but the boundaries of the boroughs, districts, quarters or whatever other subdivision the corresponding city has, overlayed with the names of the subdivisions in the
plain Sans Serif font of DIN 1451.
Luckily fellow Wikipedian hdamm already made a
vector map for the districts of Bangkok, so all I had to do was to place the names on top of that. The main difficulty were the very small districts in the center of Bangkok, especially the tiny
Samphanthawong with a long name. But nevertheless I think my map doesn't look that bad, especially considering I just spend a few hours creating it and have no earlier record of being an artist or designer. There is probably still some room for fine-tuning the image, also a separate version with the names in the Thai alphabet might be worth considering, especially now I know the
standard fonts for the Thai road signs. And of course one could do the same with any other of the 75 provinces, or for the whole country - but there the small provinces near Bangkok make it almost impossible to read.
Since hdamm had his map released under
cc-by-sa license, I have to release my artwork under the same terms, thus everyone is free to copy it provided the attribution is given, and derived works are under the same license - though for now I keep the actual SVG for myself only..
Just sad that from the millions I will now earn by selling prints or
shirts with this map in Bangkok, most of the money will go to the lawyer to protect me against the lawsuit Ork poster will file for copying their concept... At least I will be able to keep the customer busy, as soon they'd have to buy the upgrade with the
planned new district. Actually, I withheld this posting for almost a year so I can make it public after the new district is created, but now
the date for its creation is more dubious again I don't want to wait longer for grabbing the publicity this map might give this humble blog.
4 comments:
Andy I think this looks great.
I'm not quite sure I understand the legal bit though.
Your art work would look great on a tee-shirt or a poster.
Perhaps I can be your local agent and share in your millions :-)
On a personal note I am heading north next week to Samut Songkhram, Samut Sakhon and Nakom Pathom. Will hopefully ride Mae Khlong railway this time from Mahachai to Mae Klong.
Anywhere you want me to check out?
The legal stuff is half-kidding, as far as I know it is not illegal to copy such an idea, only if I were to sell it under their own name I would run into problems. While have added that shop link where one could now order a T-Shirt with that map, it is still rather expensive and I will probably get a custom-made one with that image next time I'm in BKK. Or buy it from the shop you will set up in case I make it to Prachuap :-)
One thing which I can always use are locations for the administrative offices - so in case you come to a Thesaban or TAO office it'd be great if you could record the location, or if you have no GPS could also try to identify afterwards with Google Earth. I have those of the provincial capitals, and also the district offices, but only few of the local government offices.
Excellent map Andy, I like it!
Has a bit of a 6-tees feel to it, the artwork from the early psychedelic shows in the Height.
Would definitely work well on a t-shirt! Maybe we can plan a Samui shirt as a next issue!
Cool! Nice work!
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