Maps

Woodcut Map of Golden Gate Park

This is a custom-made map of Golden Gate Park created by the people at Woodcut Maps. I met Gabe Smedresman nearly two years ago at some SF meetup group. He had just launched his new project, woodcutmaps.com, and once I heard about it I was determined to get something made. I had just bought a house on the north side of Golden Gate Park, and I wanted something personal to commemorate our new home.

The map I had made focuses on the park, but includes streets to the north and south to provide context.

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The Woodcut Maps folks made a few customizations to the design for me. The entire map was rotated a slight bit to get the streets running east-west to be perfectly horizontal. The actual streets in San Francisco run at an ever so slight diagonal, but to give the map better symmetry I wanted things to line up perfectly. They also added a small marker for my home on the north side of the park.

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I had originally intended this to be the top of a coffee table. It measures 34″ by 18″, and I believe for a very brief period right when I had it made it was the largest map Woodcut Maps had created (but that record was quickly broken). But instead of mounting it as a tabletop, my wife decided it was so gorgeous that it deserved to be front and center in our living room. So we mounted it on a wood frame and put it above our fireplace.

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I was amazed at how manual the process was to construct these maps. The pieces are all laser cut, but then they are assembled by hand. Here’s a shot of the assembly process. Some of the pieces are really tiny, and it takes a lot of patience working with tweezers to get it all done.

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Since Woodcut Maps is a local San Francisco startup I was able to meet up with them in person to see the process. They even saved a few parts of the construction for me to complete. Here’s a few shots of me putting the last bits of Stow Lake together.

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One last detail shot to show the walking paths around the De Young museum and the Academy of Sciences. I love this park!

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If you want to support a cool local San Francisco business, go check out what they’re doing at Woodcut Maps.

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