Every kid needs a map of the world. But with the quantity of questions asked by the average 4 year-old, how much detail is too much detail? With this map for my son, I tried to simplify all the way down to just the names of countries. No continents. No oceans. And just a handful of additional “need to know” places.

Inspired by the West Berlin / East Berlin divided U-Bahn lines prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this map envisions two fictional subway lines serving two very divided San Francisco communities.

We finally made it out of the country for the first time in 2.5 years, and man was it fun to take some early morning runs in new places! This map is not fictional, but instead uses real data collected by my Nike Run app, then visualized using QGIS and Adobe Illustrator.

This is an updated version of the San Francisco Playgrounds map that I created a few years ago. In addition to some newly renamed playgrounds in the city (goodbye Julius Kahn...hello Presidio Wall), I've also visualized some of the best pizza spots in San Francisco (in my very biased opinion).

Each year since the invention of flight, two elite teams of ballooning aeronauts circumnavigate the globe, touching back down to earth only for urgent provisions. and sightseeing. In 2020, this grand tradition was halted on account of a PANDEMIC.

This map visualizes all of the playgrounds of San Francisco. It’s not #fictionalcartography and is in fact quite useful. I was surprised to find that no decent map of the SF playgrounds seems to exist. So here it is.

This map details a San Francisco block in 1899 and 2019. The 1899 version of the map is heavily inspired by a Sanborn Map of my block which I located in the Library of Congress database. The 2019 version was reconstructed from open-source mapping data and lots Google Maps satellite images zoomed way in.

Bean Brew No.10 visualizes an airline route map with flights connecting to the most important locations — past, present, and future — for the brave members of the drinking cohort who stepped onboard the airplane. The beer was a Saison, of course.

California has many National Parks. This is good. But let's be honest, having this many National Parks can be just a little bit confusing to keep track off. I set out to design a map that shows the real National Parks. And some National Parks that might just exist, but don’t.

Pneumatic tube systems, which propel cylindrical vessels at speeds of greater than 1,000 feet per second, are the forgotten marvel of the last century. During the heyday of pneumatic travel, it is estimated that over 50 million people per day traveled from place to place via this pollution-free technology.

California is OK at best when it comes to public transportation. But what if we were rockstars and decided to build a subway that connected the far flung cities and towns of the state? And what if that subway system was designed by someone who was perfectly insane? That was basically my design challenge.

I grew up in New Jersey. Years later, I was lucky enough to move to California. I remember walking through the streets of San Francisco shortly after my arrival and seeing a brightly painted mural that looked instantly familiar.

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.

Take the MUNI to the tennis courts. Read my IDEO article on the creative process. This map skews totally non-fictional. Trust me. And get out there and whack some yellow balls around.

This map depicts an expedition from San Francisco to Antarctica in search of reasonably-priced urban living space. Way down south in Antarctica, the expedition team is biding its time with analog hobbies and excellent beer as they wait for the completion of the MUNI subway extension line in 2038.

This map contemplates a submarine race from Hunter's Point in San Francisco to Bay Farm Island in Oakland. The 16 submarine captains captured on the poster match the drinking data collected from the 16 Bean Brew patrons who consumed this batch of beer.

This batch of Bean Brew began with a library card attached to the back of a bottle of beer. Once the drinking data was returned by each of the 16 Bean Brew Patrons, I designed this treasure map which shows the location where each Bean Brew was consumed. I spent an inordinately long amount of time taking a pretty ordinary modern map of San Francisco and turning it into something akin to a 17th Century treasure map.

I asked the members of the Bean Brew No.3 cohort to chart their drinking experience, then captured their results with lots of graphs and impenetrable statistical analysis thrown in for good measure. The typography in the data table is intentionally out of alignment, replicating what I hoped seemed like a badly broken typewriter.