matthew.d.mercer, visual thinker

Chicago's Festival of Maps began in November 2007 as a celebration of the maps that have changed and shaped our world. Over 30 institutions and galleries participated in the festival with a variety of gallery shows, exhibits, lectures, and symposiums focused on cartography, mapping, its history, and what it means to our society and culture. The task of the website was two-fold. First, it needed to make a strong impression about the variety of opportunities to explore and learn through the festival's events. Second, it needed to work on an almost fully-automated level through a powerful administrative tool, enabling each participating institution to independently update and manage all content about their events. All of the data for each exhibit and its associated images are loaded in dynamically. The site expands to accommodate the full browser width. The kinetic motion of the map behavior is intended to put a more dynamic twist on the convention of map sites such as Google or Mapquest, with a non-traditional architecture that allows users to reveal or hide content from one central place rather than a typical top-down, drilldown system. The end result is an immersive interactive experience that complements the subject matter of the festival while presenting all of its accompanying content.

Client: Chicago Festival of Maps
Date published: Fall 2007
Role: Information Architecture & Design
Studio: 15 letters inc.

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Creative director: Mark Rattin
IA & design: Matthew Mercer
Flash shell developer: Jeff Froom
Flash interface developer: Greg Martin
Flash interface & data deployment: Ari Braginsky
Flash production: David Wang
Programming & database developer: Rich Hanson
Project coordinator: Caroline Casey
Copywriter: Amy Dunlap
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Chicago Festival of Maps Institution Detail