Reykjavik Center Map

I've no idea what this is doing on HN, but it's very nice, and I wish I'd seen it before I was there a few weeks ago. Beautiful city, far bigger and far more modern than I'd imagined, and full of lovely people.

If you like that, don't miss the link to http://www.icelandillustrated.com/

That's the most memorable tourist map I received in 6 months in Europe. It's hanging on my wall right now. Iceland does a really great job with their tourism industry.

We built something similar to this a few years ago for our campus (we are a school). Hired an illustrator to do a watercolor of the campus on large tiles (maybe 8" by 11") and then scanned them in at high resolution and created a large image that we ran through OpenLayers [1] and built a searchable campus map. Neat project. Unfortunately, maintaining the watercolor (even with the tiles) as we changed the campus (e.g. construction, new roadways, new names for old POIs) was difficult, and we had to move back to just a PDF.

[1] http://openlayers.org/

This reminds me of my favorite guidebook for the city of Prague which includes annotated illustrations of landmarks with details about features such as the identities of the statues on building facades or the contents of stained glass windows. Really helpful information for the history and architecture buff.