Map your life.

Posted in: art, buy, travel|By: Julie R. Neidlinger|February 7, 20107 Comments

I’ve never been much of a salesperson, so my technique for burying things on my site so that people don’t notice them is a finely honed craft, the likes which have rarely been seen.

A friend recently sent me an email and indicated both surprise (“I just found this on your site!”) and interest in one of the art formats I make available for commission.

Originally, I had it buried several sub-pages deep on my site with the following inglorious description:

Travel Maps: Remember your travels, trips and vacations through a custom-painted map that depicts your route and any other key events or visual elements you’d like included. This is an excellent way to remember your travels and have a great display piece.

My friend wanted to know more about it.

I can see why; my description is brief, indeed, and does little to entice anyone to pursue it further. It then occurred to me that perhaps others would, too, and so I decided to pull it up on the front page of this site and give it its own blog post.

Basically, a travel map is a map that depicts an event or time in a person’s life that can in some way be geographically mapped. Calling it a “travel” map limits what it is, frankly. The map can depict more than just travel. College, career, moving, children, vacations, pets, work, dream locations, family — anything that can somehow be depicted in a map form will work, not limited to time, but to geography.

The image I have shown here is one I did for a friend for a cruise. The style of your map doesn’t have to have this look, but this worked with the kind of subject matter at hand. The map being more than just a mere map means that I included additional things in it. Though I won’t tell you all of them (that is private, for the customer), you’ll see I have included everything from the weather on the cruise dates, activities at various stops, airport diagrams, and, if you could see it up close, the entire border has the cruise ship official description (tonnage, engines — everything) written in tiny writing all the way around. There are lots of other elements I gleefully sneaked in that won’t make sense or be noticed by the casual viewer, but will mean something to the person to whom the map was intended for.

If you are interested, please contact me directly. We can discuss your project, pricing, materials, themes, stylistic concerns, colors, ideas, etc.