30 Days of Maps Day 10 - Pen & Paper

We're onto day 10 of the #30DayMapChallenge and the theme is pen and paper - Draw a map by hand. Go analog and draw a map using pen and paper. The result doesn’t have to be perfect—it’s about the creative process.

Now this one is a real challenge as I'm no artist! As a child I loved reading the Swallows & Amazons series of books by Arthur Ransome. One of the things I loved about the books was they always contained a map showing where the different aspects of the story were set - whether in the real world, or fictional world - and sometimes somewhere in between.

Whilst the challenge is pen and paper, this doesn't mean we can't visualise the end result in Icon Map Pro and use all the same interactivity capabilities we would expect from a normal map...

I've taken inspiration from Swallows and Amazons and drawn a map of the fictional lake in the Lake District where some of the books were set. I've hand drawn it, scanned it in, and used it as a custom image background in Icon Map Pro. I then drew a small sailing dinghy, and used a online tool to convert it to a 64bit encoded data URL which I've added as a DAX measure into the Power BI report. I've then traced a path from one side of the lake to the other around some of the islands, and used the Play Axis custom visual to animate the journey of the boat across the lake. I've made a DAX measure to half-calculate the rotation angle of the boat to add to the effect.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.