Maproom is a year old and has had its first makeover, with a beguiling blue courtesy of Leon Odey-Knight and a sophisticated pan and zoom function to allow viewers to scrutinise far more detail than ever before on the base maps before purchase.
Tom Blaker has been busy working up animated base maps that non-programmers can customise without having to learn GIS software or Javascript.
We launched Maproom last year, partly as an e-commerce development experiment and partly from a hunch by Ros Ellis that there might be others like her out there who want accurate, dependable and easily editable base maps for a variety of commercial uses. We had the first sale on Christmas Day 2011 (an unexpected stocking present) and sales have increased month on month since.
To our surprise, about half of the Maproom customers turn out not to be designers – who we thought would be the only ones interested in base maps – but business people who need maps for commercial reasons but don’t necessarily know anything about vector artwork. So we have taken out the jargon and happily take calls relating to this unexpected market.
Our next major milestone will be to get base maps of London onto the site in response to popular demand!
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