Scroll to learn more about this web map based on the work of a childrens book: Pinkalicious.
Pinkalicious is a book about a young girl obsessed with eating pink cupcakes her and her family baked. She ends up eating too many and turns completely pink! I grew up loving this book so this project was a personal favorite of mine.
For this web map, I created a custom theme in Mapbox Studio that mimics the aesthetic of the book. It was fun to be creative with this project and see how similar I could make a map relate to a book. Below are some inspirations and design choices I made while creating the map style.
The map makes use of the childlike appreciation for pink by utilizing a mostly monochromatic pink color scheme and cupcakes as place locations.
I used the purple background of the house as font colors, which is complementary to pink. The pink wallpaper was also a source of inspiration for the water.
At a certain zoom, the base water is replaced with cherry patterns, copying both the cherry at the top of the cupcake and the wallpaper in the house. The cupcake is used as a place location for main cities.
Based on the given pictures above, I chose these colors as the main color palette of the map. The roads are the gold accents of the crown and title color while the land is various hues of pink.
I only picked two typefaces: A Yummy Apology and Yantia. A Yummy Apology is used as a decorative typeface for small scale places like continents and countries, while all uppercase Yantia is used on the rest of the labels. The roads are all lowercase. I chose to differentiate the different capitilazation to mimic a kid, with scratchy handwriting and less formal on a more zoomed scale.
Madison, WI looks like this with the theme. You can see all fonts, roads, and water patterns in the city.
Dallas, Texas highlights the busy road network seen in this city and others across the globe.
Tokyo, Japan shows a more complex road network and also highlights the different type faces. It can be used in character based languages like Japanese.
Finally, a look at the Alps and the hillshade. The whiter mountain tops mixed with the pink embody frosting on a cupcake.
Credits:
Map created with Mapbox Studio
Data from openstreetmap
Cupcake SVG from the Noun Project