TUMO lab: Gastronomic Map of Yerevan
Over the duration of two weeks a group of 16 students together with me and under my supervision were making a map showing Yerevan's most recommended cafes and restaurants.
The brief:
An illustrated map is a task that requires a variety of different skills such as ability to carefully follow instructions and guidelines, hand lettering, character design, attention to detail etc.
An illustrated map is a task that requires a variety of different skills such as ability to carefully follow instructions and guidelines, hand lettering, character design, attention to detail etc.
At first I had a rough vision of how I wanted the map to be an at what scale it needed to work. I wanted it to be more stationary rather than something to carry around, since we have phone apps these days and we all know what happens with paper maps that get overused.
TUMO lab coordinators helped me come up with a google map of all the worthy places in Yerevan. I put the map together to the right size by compiling screenshots (took forever!) and sliced it into 16 squares.
Each student from my team got a square to work with, to the size of roughly 350x350mm.
The first step was to trace the streets, do lettering of the street names and draw the pins.
As each student was working on their own individual piece I needed a mechanism to effectively bring all of these together into one map, so with the help of Google backup and sync (since everything was on TUMO google drive) I managed to link all the files into one InDesign document.
The image below is the result of day 4.
Next step was to fill the map with trees and hedges, notable buildings and characters of Yerevan.
Filling in the map started with an observational drawing session in the city centre. Overcoming the fear and shyness we managed to observe and documents some of the characters of Yerevan.
Little by little the map started to fill with new characters, trees and notable buildings.
I also asked each student to draw a little character of themselves, to place them on their square like a signature.
And to finish off the project each student produced a few mockups for their portfolio — of the map itself and of the characters that they produced during lab.
Really hope that very soon the map will be seen across Yerevan!
