Awesome Maps

If GeoGuessr is too hard for you, check out BenjaminTD’s Unzoomed. It’s a free, quick, and, most of all, forgiving location guessing game. You start off with a zoomed-in top-down view of a city. Each time you make an incorrect guess, the map zooms out to (hopefully) give you more clues. We’d probably do better with maps from video games.

Filmmaker Jordan Studdard grew up with dreams of living in New York City. Now that he’s been there for a few years, he created an homage to The Big Apple with a wall-sized map of the city, dotted with tiny lights to mark locations made famous by the movies and TV shows that inspired him.

Cityframes makes incredibly detailed 3-dimensional maps of cities from around the world. They’re available as small collectible blocks they call Cubes or expansive maps called Frames that cover larger areas. Their bundles let you mix and match different sizes to fill an entire wall. Each map is 3D printed from biodegradable plastic set into a wooden frame.

This oversized padded mat covers a 31.5″ x 15.7″ area on your desktop with a world map, offering an expansive mousing surface and protecting your desk surface from scratches. It’s easy to clean, features a rubberized backing to prevent slipping, and stitched edges for durability.

Track your travels around the U.S. National Parks with this laser-cut wood map from SeeYouOnTheTrail. Each park is marked on the map with a cutout of an evergreen tree. Once you visit the park, pop in one of the green trees to say you were there. The map measures 16.5″ wide x 10″ tall and also comes in colorful sunrise and woodland hues editions.

Science fiction books, TV shows, and movies often set their stories in real locations in space. The Overview Effect put together a visualization that charts the relative locations of stories in fictional works like Star Trek and Alien, and Dune, using actual places in the universe to illustrate their distances and relationships.

Artist Ed Fairburn creates incredible portraits by drawing intricate crosshatch patterns on maps. His precision penmanship works hand-in-hand with the underlying map lines to produce outlines of his subjects and explores the relationship between people and the world around us. You can find prints and originals of Ed’s work on his website.

Artist Isaac Dushku loves maps so much that he goes by the nickname Lord of Maps. After making a Highest Mountains Print that shows the tallest mountains in each US state, he teamed up with his brothers Gideon and Alex to create a book that captures the same idea using cutout pages. The Highpoints has a lay-flat binding for easy coffee-table viewing.

The data that Google Maps has amassed is pretty amazing. Bad Decisions Studio shows us how it’s possible to use the Google Maps API and Cesium to bring the power of its global data into Unreal Engine 5 to add your own lighting and make high-fidelity 3D renderings of any location on the planet.

Louisville, Kentucky-based The Wooden States creates precision-cut hardwood wall art based on state shapes. Each one is backed with four strong magnets which can hold onto key rings, pocket knives, jewelry, and other metal objects. In addition to individual states, there’s a version of the entire continental U.S.

Luckies of London and Suck UK teamed up to create this unique tabletop globe for travel enthusiasts. It features a scratch-off gold layer that lets you gradually reveal the locations you’ve visited around our planet. It includes US and Australian state and Canadian province and territory lines and is available in 5.5″ and  8″ diameters.

California’s Wildflower Leather Co. makes stylish handcrafted leather accessories. Among their collection is this unique olive + buck brown wallet with a topographic pattern inspired by Yosemite National Park. It’s made from top-grain, vegetable-tanned leather and opens to reveal card and cash slots on both halves.

Artist Isaac Dushku, aka the Lord of Maps created this print that illustrates the tallest point in each U.S. state. It’s the only place you can see the rolling hills of Virginia, the Colorado Rockies, and Alaska’s Denali in the same place. Available in 16″x20″ and 22″x28″ sizes. Global travelers, check out The Seven Summits.

This concave metal coin from MetonBoss feels good in the hand and is a great place to focus nervous energy. It’s made from aerospace-grade aluminum and engraved with a detailed topographic map pattern. Available in 1″ dia x 0.15″ thick and 2.15″ dia x 0.35″ thick versions. Personalization is also available.

Artist and designer Dom Riccobene painstakingly replicated the full single-player map of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto V as a 3D model. Because of the size of his 3D printer, he broke the map down into 24 quadrants, then assembled each piece onto a 20″ x 30″ base. We enjoyed watching the map legend being carved too.

Commemorate your adventures and travels with these outstanding wood artworks from Topo Trail Maps. Each one is custom-made by artist Trevor Crosta based on a trail you specify. They feature deep, 3-dimensional carvings of the terrain, and come in two National Parks designs, as well as a rectangular floating frame.