I had nothing to do this afternoon, so what's better than go creative, right?

I had this idea of making a map of my music listening habits just recently, after ~at-Kapo linked me a nice, kinda unusual online-radio. One that is highly customizable, as it --visually-- plays your songs along trails. So I figured, why not take this to the next step?

I present:


the rotaneco musicmap v1.1

To start, I fist gathered my music charts (top artists and the like) from both my last.fm profile and my Winamp Media Library, collated and sorted the data, and sketched out a quick map. I wanted the most played artists right in the centre (Boards of Canada in my case), and not so popular ones further towards the edge. To get a clear structure I decided to break it into 4 major genres, more or less: Instrumental, Electronic, Pop and Rock, each based in one corner. Of course, it wasn't always 100% clear how to group the artists, so in some cases I went with personal taste.

Next step: Adobe Illustrator. Layouting the beast! And this took by far the longest. After all the "tracks" were layed out and the "stations" labelled, I went to colour it. Each genre got its own base colour so I could easily mix them when a trail didn't belong in just one genre. That's why there is a colourwheel up there in the bottom right rather than the usual caption of a subway map.

Next step: Adobe Photoshop. Importing the map I created in Illustrator and adding all the little details: background, the colourwheel, my logo, and I created my own fictional "tranceport*" company and a short ad text, all to make it look more like an authentic subway map.

And that's it! Enjoy :]


<sub>Disclaimer: "Designs & Interfaces > Signage" was the most appropriate category that I could find. The map focuses equally on the idea and on the technical side, that's why it doesn't belong in the "Vexel" gallery IMO. Besides, the most fitting subcat there would be "Vexel > Misc", and that's just not good enough.

* and yep, I borrowed Paul Oakenfold's title here.</sub>