Lauren Ancona had barely finished writing the first stages of a new computer code to map every city in the world in the form of a blueprint when she first noticed “#blueprinted” make an appearance on Twitter.
“I wasn’t trying to do anything with it,” she said of the program she had taken to creating in her spare time. “It was just a (Github) project and somebody found it.”
The Philadelphia-native describes how a number of people have since used the map to locate their blueprinted hometown before tweeting out the image with the hashtag and name of the city.
“And I still haven’t even finished the code yet,” she added of the few coding loose ends that remain to be tied up.
That the maps look appealing and are fun to play with is hard to deny – like viewing planet earth through 22 intricate zoom levels of an architect’s global master plan.
Ancona fashioned the web tool with the Mapbox Studio development program and using data scraped from the OpenStreetMap, a community-curated free wiki world map.
Her big idea was to enable users to create bespoke and detailed images of their favorite locations. These could then be printed off and transformed into posters that could be framed and hung on the walls of bars, restaurants, businesses, homes or the like.
“I wanted to make a simple tool that would let users choose the zoom level and order a custom printed poster of wherever they live,” she explained.
“You go to these high design stores or online shops and you see these very stylized maps that everyone has in their flat. They’re really cool but they’re only ever of the top ten cities in size.”
So far, the option to print off and buy a poster is not yet available but its something Ancona hopes she will have time to dedicate to soon.
The whole scenario is all the more remarkable given Ancona only learned to code and design her first map under a year ago.
She underwent an intensive class of programing to get her up to the level required to create the likes of the blueprint map.
The former music student-cum-graphic-designer has since secured a new job as a data scientist at the Philadelphia Office for Innovation and Technology.
Unsurprisingly, Ancona’s day job now involves coding and mapping out her home city.
See if you can guess the unnamed cities mapped out in blueprint form in the gallery atop the page.