The San Francisco to Great Bear Lake Canal

This map visualizes a fake canal flowing north from San Francisco to the far reaches of northern Canada, as accurately as possible. Created as part of the Bean Brew No.8 experience, the map was distributed to the first actual paying customers of Bean Brew.

The premise behind the map is a nearly 3,000 mile canal stretching from San Francisco to Great Bear Lake, the largest lake entirely contained in Canada. All of the stops along the canal are real places and (where possible) the course of the canal adheres to actual bodies of water found between San Francisco and the Northwest Territories.

11 of the 16 customers who purchased a bottle of Bean Brew No.8 managed to return their drinking survey (which came attached to the back of the bottle). I mapped some of the data they provided to 11 fictional factories corresponding to the actual locations where they consumed their bottle of Bean Brew. My IDEO colleague Sean Tang even flew to Iceland with his bottle, just to raise the level of cartographic difficulty.

I designed the map using publicly available data sources, Google Maps, QGIS, and Adobe Illustrator. The map is a three-color silkscreen, and was printed by Rand Renfrow in Austin.