The Story of Pin Adventure map
HOW THIS STARTED
A few months in Brazil, and I came home with a phone full of photographs
and nothing on the wall.
WHAT I COULDN'T FIND
A map I could actually use. Place names too small to read once you got
close. Pin heads that covered the town you'd just marked. Fine from across
the room, useless at the distance you actually stand when you're
remembering something.
So I made the one I wanted.
WHAT WE BUILT
Every push pin travel map here starts from our own cartography. Not licensed stock art, but real maps built with cartographers and GIS data, so the small places are still there when you go looking.
The pins are 5 mm. Big enough to see from the doorway, small enough that a
dozen trips through Europe still leaves the map readable underneath. A
hundred of them with every map.
Colour took the longest. We went through interior trends and colour harmony
properly before settling the range, because a map hangs on a wall for years
and has to live with the room.
HOW IT IS MADE
The board is rigid foam, not card. Push a pin in anywhere on it and it
holds — the whole surface, not just near the edges. It is light enough to
go on a plasterboard wall without special fixings, and the core is 90%
recycled paper, because I went through every material we use and changed
what I could.
We print with pigment inks, so the colours come out bright and sharp and
don't wash out in a bright room.
WHO'S BEHIND IT
We've been printmakers since 2010. The maps came later.
We make them ourselves, in our own workshop. Ten colours on the press, and
someone here looks at every map before it ships. Personalise yours and you
see a proof first. Nothing goes to press until you've told us it's right.
WHERE WE'VE GOT TO
Here on Etsy since 2011.
The world, the States, Europe and Canada. Twenty-eight colourways, nine
sizes, and five ways of making one — poster, mounted, canvas, framed,
framed canvas. More than five hundred versions in all. You only need one of
them. The range is there so the one you end up with is the one you'd have
chosen anyway.
Four in five leave here with a line printed on them. A name, a date, the
two words that only mean anything to two people. Those are my favourite
ones to set, and I have set a lot of them.
One of these ended up as a wedding seating chart, every table named after a
mountain the couple had hiked together. Another went out as a gift and, in
the buyer's words, had him welling up. 4.8 here across 626 reviews, and 4.6
on Trustpilot.
Every pin in one of these is a place someone actually went. That's still
the part I like.