Mapping Burgers

I've been really excited about the projects that I've been working on at Serious Eats, and the burger map that we published yesterday is a great example of how the design and development team has been working closely with editorial to rapidly produce new areas of the site to showcase Serious Eats content. One of the things that I love about Serious Eats is the deep archive of writing about all things food, but it's always been hard to find and surface (for a number of reasons which I won't get into here).  

Kenji and the editorial team came to us at the beginning of June with an idea for a burger map for the Fourth of July; they'd choose 50 burgers and gather links and photos to previous recipes and reviews. They had a vague idea that it should be clickable but beyond that it was up to us. We told the editors to gather their data in a Google spreadsheet for now, since they're used to that workflow already, and I dove into design. 

Two early conceptual sketches in Photoshop

These days I'm using Photoshop just for rough sketching rather than fully fleshing out the entire design, which has been a major sense of relief for me. The aim is to convey overall look and feel in the vein of style tiles rather than making specific layout choices or details. For those that argue that jumping right into CSS kills creativity, I would counter that it provides a set of constraints that one must be creative within. I know what's possible and where I can push the limits. It frees me from doing theoretical finished comps in Photoshop that would never work in the real world; so many of the issues that need to be solved with a responsive design only come to light as you interact with the page, and there is no way you can see that with flat comps. And we didn't have much finished content to work with since we were working in parallel with the editors. 

Development-wise we had recently built NearMe as a way to explore and organize location-based content, but this wasn't quite the right tool for this project. However, the templating system that 29th Street Publishing had put into place was exactly what we needed. On top of that, we found a script for exporting a Google spreadsheet to JSON and an svg library called Raphael.js for the map. The script enabled the editors to continue their workflow undisturbed and we didn't need to build anything custom to store the data; maybe it won't scale if we're doing many maps a week, but we just needed to ship it quickly. 

Now we've got a reusable base of design and code that we can spin off into other projects and a better idea of where we can take things. I definitely want to explore more mapping possibilities with MapBox, Leaflet, and OpenStreetMap (this is a really inspiring example!), as I think it's an effective way to group content to tell a larger story. And I finally feel like I'm getting comfortable with the process that responsive design requires to tackle some larger changes on Serious Eats. 

Ever forward!