To find out more about the team behind the IFLOVEMAPS Facebook page and Twitter account, we reached out to the creators, Pablo Izquierdo and Lars Erik, who have been developing maps together for over a decade. The duo lives in Oslo and Madrid and they have a company called Mapographics that delivers services in the GIS-space (GIS = Geographical Information Systems).
Pablo explained that the main goal of Mapographics is to make maps that are informative, educational, and hopefully also nice to look at. “We have developed a lot of maps and analysis in the sustainability domain, and lately we have also started to sell maps for decoration. We love to merge scientific data with design,” he told Bored Panda.
The birth of IFLOVEMAPS was ten years ago, when Pablo and Lars Erik talked about making a social media page where they could share their love for maps. “It started with a Facebook page, and then moved on to Twitter and Instagram. We’re super happy to have several hundreds of thousands of followers, which to us is only a testimonial that many people share our love of maps,” Pablo said.
When asked if it’s true that more and more people are interested in maps, Pablo explained that we live in an ever more globalized society, and the distances between us are getting smaller due to cultural exchange and technology. “In addition, themes such as those that relate to environment, climate, sustainability, man-build-environment and more, nurture more interest in the spatial dimensions of things. Maps can represent how things are tied together in the spatial dimension, or geographical sense.” He added that “we experience a much higher interest in maps, more advanced spatial analysis, and more lightly, storytelling.”
Pablo explained that “from a social media point of view, people love maps that are spot-on in conveying a message of stereotypical characteristics and differences between countries. From a more professional point of view, the interest in sustainability related topics in maps has skyrocketed in recent years, such as maps showing degradation of nature or the effects of climate change. But more generally speaking, what we see is that maps, as a way to represent data or tell a story, are increasingly used in media, by the government, NGOs and even in the business community.”
But making a good map that is based on advanced data, that tells a story and that looks good (or at least tries to) is a process of trial and failure, Pablo argues. “To put it simply, the process starts from the idea on what story/data the maps should express, to identification of data source, quality assurance, data processing, GIS processing, and working to ensure the final print has crisp and flawless details when it turns into a final product.”
