Explore the Voices of England in our collaboration with English Heritage and Alan Kitching

After the success of the award winning Interactive Myths and Legends map, English Heritage asked us to collaborate with them on a second edition, this time based on the theme Voices of England.

This year we had the pleasure of working with the letterpress legend, Alan Kitching. Renowned for creating stunning bold and colourful typographic map visuals using traditional letterpress techniques, we couldn’t wait to get to work with him.

The challenge, of course, was how to interpret Alan’s artwork as a digital interactive map. We met up at the beginning of the process and discussed ideas, challenges and solutions and quickly settled on the idea to include three zoom levels on the map. The user can ‘pinch and zoom’ to reveal more levels of detail such as counties, cities and landmarks - allowing them to immerse themselves with the typography itself.

Whilst the creative process was taking place the technical team at Gravitywell quickly put together a prototype using sketch compositions, so that we could test and refine the mechanics of the map. Once we had ironed out the creases and built the final map web app, all that was left to do was drop in the final artwork from Alan. And voila, view the Voices of England map.