Green Spaces and Elevated Places: Reinventing Maps with Outside Inspiration
In an era where innovation is paramount, companies constantly seek ways to stand out and deliver unique value to their clients. Cecilian Partners is no exception.
But, we go about it a little differently.
Our team comes from a broad array of industries and backgrounds, and we pride ourselves on sourcing creative inspiration from unconventional places. As our Senior Lead Map Engineer, I frequently seek external influences to elevate one of our core products: interactive, 3D maps. Maps are a key tool for selling homes in master planned communities – you’re much more likely to convert a buyer if they can see themselves living in the place you created.
With that in mind, here’s a glimpse into how external influences have infused creativity into our projects and set a new standard for digital mapping in real estate.
Embracing the Green: The Influence of Tree Sprites
A key realization came from understanding the importance of green spaces in planned communities – they’re thoughtfully incorporated into the design and valued by residents. Looking for a better way to showcase these areas, we found a groundbreaking idea in a Mapbox newsletter.
Mapbox is a mapping and location cloud platform for developers (it’s how we build location finding into our maps). The newsletter featured an article on a unique use of their software by Woov, an app that shows various amenities at concert venues.
Woov utilized something we’d never considered before: 2D sprite trees. It’s a fast, efficient technique for displaying a variety of tiny icons (or sprites) in a given map area all at once, without slowing down the map’s performance. This simple yet effective approach significantly improved how we depict the green areas in our customers’ communities.
We now deploy dozens of maps leveraging this technology to bring virtual landscapes to life.
Ski Maps: Blending Art and Functionality
TOur exploration into creative mapping solutions brought us to the realm of skiing, a passion shared by many of our clients. Inspired by the legendary work of James Niehues, who has crafted ski maps for decades, we ventured into designing maps for ski-amenitized properties.
These maps, including those for The Club at Tamarack in Tamarack, Idaho, and Marcella Club, located in Park City, Utah, provide critical information while capturing the beauty of these locales with detailed labels, retro color aesthetics, and 3D elevations.
Our latest project, Marcella, is a testament to our commitment to blending art with functionality, drawing heavily from Niehues’ iconic style.
Redefining Amenity Areas
Finally, our customers have an aversion to conventional, "mappy" representations of amenity areas. That really pushed us to think outside the box.
Drawing inspiration from marketing maps and visionary renderings, we’ve found ways to depict amenity areas with remarkable detail. That includes adding extra layers to enhance bodies of water, highlighting individual features of amenity-rich areas, and using vectorized patterns to add texture. These kinds of innovations tend to exceed our customers’ expectations, transforming mundane maps into captivating visual experiences.
In the end, each project brings new opportunities to learn, innovate, and inspire in our quest for unconventional creativity. By keeping our minds open to the world around us, our team remains at the forefront of delivering exceptional value to our clients.
For us, the sky's the limit in the world of real estate mapping.
