April at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web 2007 at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

I’m currently working on several new websites which share a common theme – the data therein is predominantly displayed on a map. The development process has raised major design and interaction issues – is the map a navigation tool? should it interact with the existing site navigaton? does the site work equally as well without the map, or should it? All these questions will be discussed many times over the coming months.

But by far the greatest and most immediate challenge one of graphical design – namely, where to put the map? And how big? Can we still use a fluid layout? How will it affect our carefully calculated grid system? For a map to be of any use to anyone it needs to be be fairly large, thus consuming plenty of screen real estate. But having such a large area given over to one element really seems to stifle the design of any particular page, immediately reducing flexibility and flow. It also introduces challenges of its own with regards to content and, especially, advertisements and their relative positioning above or below the fold.

Suddenly the very proportions of your page layout are being based around the dimensions of your map. Hell, the limited palette and lack of customisation of the majority of map providers out there means it will also start to affect your chosen colour scheme.

Next thing you know it feels as if you’re constrained to designing wholly within a new paradigm, one of map markers and pop up info bubbles and just off yellowy-white hover-over background highlighting.

Is Google Maps killing web design? Or is Yahoo! Maps, for that matter? Or any of the other providers – Mapquest, Multimap etc? Look on any of their developer networks and you’ll see plenty of technical innovation, but very little in the way of inspiring graphic design. The method currently in vogue seems to be to stick the map in a prominent position, then squeeze in whatever navigation or search fields you have around the edges wherever possible. Google have employed their traditional no-frills approach, and it looks, well……no-frills. Functional? Yes. Pretty? No. And they do it with hardly any non-map content on there!

So I’ll be wrestling with this challenge for a while yet, as I’ve got loads of content to squeeze on, while keeping the map functional and satisfying the advertisers. I’ll come back here with any solutions I come up with.