Take a Bus to the Court

TLDR

This map visualizes the public tennis courts of San Francisco, a simple resource that was surprisingly difficult to find at the time.

Juicy details

From the original 2018 IDEO blog post on this map, which is a bit dated, but tells the story of the map better and in more detail than I can now.

Urban hiking is a habit of ours. We’re city people and our only family car is a Vespa that is much too slow to cross any bridges. So most weekends if it’s nice out we’ll chart an urban hike through San Francisco, targeting a different neighborhood and a different park. This has kept us occupied for the last few years. But let’s be honest. San Francisco is actually a small city. They don’t call it the 7X7 for nothing. Which is one of the reasons my wife and I have started to get interested in tennis. Sure the game is fun (although neither of us are very good), but what interested us more was the distributed location of the courts around the city. Sprinkled across the whole of the city like sprinkles on a hipster cupcake, visiting all of these tennis courts would be a great way to explore San Francisco in a new sort of way. And it would keep us busy for at least the next couple of years of Saturdays!

There was only one problem. I couldn’t find a decent tennis map of San Francisco. I wanted a map that was useful of course, but also one that was well designed. So I decided to make one myself and give it to my wife as a birthday gift, with the goal of making it attractive enough that she would agree to hang it on our wall, but also useful enough that we would actually use it as part of our new Saturday hobby. And lastly, I also wanted to visualize the MUNI bus routes, showing which bus could be taken to which tennis court (since riding the bus is another vocation that my wife enjoys).

My starting point was the only map I could find — a Google map that showed the tennis courts of San Francisco in 2003 graphic design glory. But this was a start! I opened the map, then downloaded it as a KML file. What’s a KML file? It stands for “Keyhole Markup Language” (I have no idea what this means), but what it does is important. With a KML file of the tennis courts, I could manipulate the data file in ArcGIS or QGIS, two enormously powerful pieces of cartography software! For anyone looking to get into amateur cartography, I strongly recommend QGIS. It works on a Mac (which ArcGIS doesn’t) and its cost (Free dollars!) outweighs its bugginess.

My next stop was DataSF.org, which has lots of great data, including maps of the city. What I was looking for here was something called a Shapefile. (“The shapefile format is a popular geospatial vector data format for geographic information system software.”) I found one corresponding to San Francisco neighborhoods and another for San Francisco parks. Last, I found one for the MUNI bus routes of San Francisco. I clicked export for each map and I was good to go.

Next it was off to QGIS to combine my various datasets into a single map.

First there were neighborhoods. Then tennis courts. Then parks. Then bus lines.

With a couple of tweaks, I was able to label the tennis courts and isolate the MUNI bus lines according to route number, instead of it looking like a giant red spiderweb.

There are many a professional cartographer out there who would have kept playing at this point in QGIS, making their map a bit prettier I’m sure. But I’m a designer and the sooner I’m able to get out of QGIS and into the Adobe Creative Suite, the happier I’ll feel (and the higher likelihood that the final design of the map will be something that someone is willing to hang on a wall). Luckily, QGIS has an option to export a file as an SVG file (a vector format that can be opened by Illustrator).

I double-clicked the file and anxiously waited to see if Illustrator would open the file (QGIS doesn’t always play nice with Illustrator, one of the delightful bugs I mentioned before; but remember, it’s FREE DOLLARS). It was my lucky day. The file opened.

Wait, what? Why does it look worse? Totally natural and easily fixable. I isolated each layer (parks, tennis courts, MUNI Lines, neighborhoods) and then got to work playing around with colors and stroke weight and other good stuff, all of it so much easier because I was out of QGIS and into a piece of software that most designers are much more familiar with.

At some point during this process, my day job at IDEO led me to Amsterdam for a few days of design research. While there, I was inspired by the fantastically designed Dutch train maps and a pro tip from my graphic designer colleague (Anthony Stimola) that the Dutch font of choice is DIN. Back in front of my computer, I created a look and feel for the map (including heavy use of DIN) inspired by my travels.

Next up was the laborious process of determining which bus lines one could actually take to each tennis court. My approach was 100% analog, starting from the top of the alphabetical list of tennis courts (Alamo Square) and marching straight through to the end (Youngblood Coleman), making note on the map all of the bus lines that had a stop within reasonable walking distance of a court. I discovered that Helen Wills court in North Beach takes the prize as most MUNI accessible tennis court (served by 9 bus lines!), with five tennis courts served by a single bus line.

Lastly, I considered how this map would be used. Of course I was hoping that my wife (and others) would find it attractive enough to hang on a wall in full analog glory. But this is 2018, and in order to be useful for how most people navigate San Francisco, the map also needed some connection back to the digital world. In order to make this happen, I added GPS coordinates and a clickable URL link to a Google Maps location for each tennis court.

That’s it! My wife was happy with her birthday gift, even agreeing to hang it on our wall! This past weekend we used our new map to find the McCoppin Square court in the Sunset neighborhood. A few minutes after we started playing, two women arrived excited to play. Unfortunately, they would need to wait until we stepped off the courts (once our 30 minute time limit had elapsed). Eager to play, they asked us if we knew of any other tennis courts in the area? In fact we did! I texted her a PDF of my new map and off they went to a nearby court. Hurray for the power of a good map!

Format

Format

Digital Print