Puszcza Bukowa is a tourist guide Android app I have been developing during whole 2016. It's devoted to a beautiful forest area in north-west of Poland, near the city of Szczecin.
It started a year ago when I began exploring the area on my bicycle. Along with gathering information, I was drawing the map. The forest is about 180 square kilometres in area, and it took me several months to visit every single place, cycle every path and plot it on map.
All artworks were drawn with a pen first, then scanned and vectorized. After that, they were colorized and added to the map in Illustrator.
The map contains several thousand of elements, all drawn one by one, basing on notes from the field. All buildings were drawn in 2 stages, first designed in 3D, then redrawn based on the 3D projection.
During the field trips, many wonderful places were seen. The area is generally well known for it's almost biggest beech forest in Europe.
The area, despite it's beauty is very rarely visited by tourists. Me, as a person grown up there, I felt I needed to change something about that.
The feedback was very strong.
It became quite popular in local media, leading to a number of press articles.
During the process of creation, a promotional video was created. It was filmed during the field trips, in the most popular and interesting places. All work done with a smartphone.
So far, over 1000 Android machines are using the app regularly, which is a very good result, taking into account it's local & non-profit character.
The application can be downloaded from Google Play, free of charge. https://goo.gl/fM8pCQ
Thank you!
