Schematic Map of Pune

Making of the Schematic Map of Pune

I've stayed in Pune since age 6, that makes me a 22 yr old Pune-ite. Naturally I'm extremely fond of my city. Whenever I'm away from my beloved city, I'm looking around for people from Pune. The first time was when I went to Ahmedabad to study for my graduation. During introductions, some of my batch-mates said they were from Pune and my ears picked it up! But to my dismay none of them were from 'my' pune! The distances from our homes were so large that it was a pain to make vacation plans to meet up in spite of being in the same city!
Pune has grown a lot in the past 10 years. 'My' Pune is this limited area which can be termed as old pune. I thought it would be interesting to put the blooming Pune city on the map- citing the broad areas and giving everyone a framework of how close/ apart all the Pune-ites are!

Since I was looking at a huge scale, I had to stitch 3 screenshots from Google maps together. I was utterly bewildered because this is how it looked like.

I started out by marking the places, areas, roads that I thought were important. I realized there were 4 major highways and the river Mutha that sort of enclosed Pune from all directions and within. I mapped a few close to heart places and my home to mark the old 'my' pune.

Removing the Google map reference seemed wise at this point as it was cluttering the focus area.

It still seemed a lot confusing (By the way, this is exactly how I felt when people say they are from Pune and I can't figure out exactly from where). So I took it on paper and simply drew a free form of the river and the roads.

I saw that the Mutha river makes a 'Y' shape if the map is rotated a bit to the left. Distinct forms started emerging as I traced this drawing. I also skewed the roads to make it more symmetric.

Now I could see the areas located distinctly near some highway and could establish their relationship from one another. I decided to take the work back to illustrator to refine this using some visual metaphor. I thought of making it look like a flower that has multiple petals. But the blossoming pune metaphor didn't work out that great!

So started with a different style keeping in mind the food-joint/ meeting places and mapping areas according to the spicy/ sweet customer service! Pune is infamous for the (not so good) customer service. But this applies only to the older parts of pune where 'Customer is not their king'! However, there was confusion regarding the icons I had used. The chilly was considered as an icon for spicy food place. I decided to go in that direction and jotted down the spicy places I knew in Pune. Taking that further I decided to mark some places famous for desserts, some to visit and the lovely gardens in Pune. The zones for good and bad customer service were marked in light grey dotted lines with speech bubbles.The roads were of uneven widths and treatments which also needed to be corrected.

The colours seemed too bright and the top border looked too strong so played around a bit. So I decided to take those down. I shared it with my friends in Pune and they didn't understand the context of customer service joke. Those dialogue boxes were disturbing the information anyway so I felt it would be better to remove that too.
Finally, this is the final map!