City Maps

Ended up launching the site to the German subreddit - following people's repeated requests for the original files of created maps.

The post got taken down for self-promotion after 15 minutes but was back up 2 hours later after a claryfying chat with the mods.

Still performed quite good: in the following days, city-maps.eu received ~500 visits, and 90 users downloaded 130 maps on Gumroad, leaving 15 bucks in donations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/rhsdgx/die_beliebten_stadtillustrationen_für_euch_zum/

As commitment was tough with lots of other projects going on, I decided to focus on a one major hackathon-like building session.

Since Reddit was only meant as the temporary home for sharing the maps and lots of people requested to have download links, I decided to build a web-offering for people to download them and later have the option to purchase them as a print.

Ended up using my convenience stack of Next.js + Tailwind UI and Gumroad to handle "sales" (gave them away for 0+€ - pay-what-you-want). Bought the domain city-maps.eu and finished the site in one sunday. Sucess!

I ran some experiments with physical versions of the maps - printed some as stickers, posters and even used a Lasercutter to burn it into wood. Had to learn a bit about vector formats, graphic programs and such. Would love to work on more physical version in the future!

I ended up creating more maps for the German subreddit and posting some to other subreddits like /r/Amsterdam or /r/Paris just to see if I can recreate the initial success in terms of interest.

Karlsruhe ended up staying the most popular one, and as novelty wore off I decided to take a break on focus on other things.

Being part of the German subreddit for a while, I thought it would be a good place to share an early example of a created map and see if people would like it.

I ended up posting one of Karlsruhe, a city that both happened to be relevant in recent conversations on the subreddit as well as being one of the more technically-orientated cities in Germany (means more Reddit users from there :).

The thread reached top that day with 1k+ upvotes and 100+ comments sharing feedback and requests for further maps: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/pfqk54/ich_erstelle_für_de_stilisierte_landkarten_diese/

Stumbled upon the prettymaps repository on GitHub after reading Hacker News. Tried to rebuild some of the examples and had some promising results generating maps for places in my immediate surroundings (Germany).

As the maps were pretty beautiful in general, I ended up sending them to some friends to see if they like them as well and would be interested in having one from their city.