Why We Still Love Putting Pins in Maps
From early map pins to Google Maps and modern travel maps, the humble map pin has proved remarkably difficult to replace.
Drop a pin.
Today, it's a phrase we associate with the digital world. We drop pins to share where we are, save somewhere we'd like to visit or remember a favourite place.
But long before the pin became an icon on a screen, people were quite literally pushing them into maps.
And they took it surprisingly seriously.
Maps and pins – over 100 years ago
In Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts, first published in 1914, American engineer Willard C. Brinton devoted an entire chapter to “Maps and Pins.”
His examples reveal a surprisingly sophisticated world of coloured map pins, glass heads, beads, flags and markers – all used to turn static maps into interactive displays of information.
One map plotted the origins of thousands of letters sent to philanthropist Mary Harriman. Another showed where Harvard graduates were living, using beads stacked on wire above the map to represent numbers.
Brinton even considered how maps should be mounted so that the pins would go deep enough to “hold fast” – a problem we've found ourselves revisiting more than a century later.
From the pinboard to the screen
As mapping became digital, the physical pin might have been expected to disappear.
Instead, it became one of the most recognisable symbols in modern mapping.
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Today we instinctively understand what it means to drop a pin. But there's still something particularly satisfying about doing it for real – finding somewhere on a map and physically marking I've been here.
And that's where the map becomes personal.
We make the map. Your travels add the next layer.
When we decided to create our own Push Pin Maps, there was one thing we didn't want to change: the map itself.
Our lithographic maps are printed on paper using metallic and fluorescent inks, with areas of screen-printed gloss varnish. Rather than replacing that with canvas, we adapted the way our maps are mounted and framed so that the original printed surface could become pinnable.
Then you take over.
Metallic pins in copper, gold, silver and black add another physical layer above the printed inks and varnishes. Fine route wire in copper, silver and red connects them, creating lines across the map to record road trips, adventures and journeys.
The result is part map, part travel record and part creative project – with a subtle three-dimensional quality as the inks, varnish, pins and wire catch the light at different levels.
A map that keeps changing
Perhaps that's the enduring appeal of a world map with pins.
It isn't finished when you hang it on the wall.
Add a pin after a weekend away. Map a road trip with wire. Mark somewhere you've always wanted to visit. Gradually, the map becomes a record that's completely your own.
Two people can start with exactly the same map and, a few years later, have two entirely different pieces on their walls.
More than a century after Brinton wrote about Maps and Pins, we're still pushing pins into maps.
We're just using them to tell our own stories.
Pin the places. Map the journeys.