As we mentioned a month or so ago, we have been working very hard on a relaunch of our Kaliningrad guide, last published in 2000. Currently at the printer, a PDF version can be downloaded for free, here.
One of the challenges we faced with Kaliningrad was finding an attractive, up-to-date and reliable map for the city available at a decent price. To be honest, we couldn’t. So we decided to take a new approach: we made our own maps.
To do so, we used base data from Open Street Map (OSM), an open source digital map foundation which operates much in the same way as Wikipedia.
To the data from OSM we added some of our own from our content management system (Pocket Content), before adding various labels and customising the styling. Using OSM as opposed to conventional map makers has proven to be highly rewarding. It gives us total control over how our maps look and what they include.
Our man who can when it comes to OSM is our long-term graphic designer, Tomáš Haman. He is now currently working on new maps for some existing IYP guides, starting with Vilnius. (You can actually see the new Vilnius maps in the new Vilnius guide).
Over the next few months he will be preparing new maps for all IYP guides using OSM, in order to make them more useful, attractive and homogenous. We hope you like them.
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