{"id":2114,"date":"2026-03-17T11:12:51","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T11:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/?p=2114"},"modified":"2026-03-25T09:18:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T09:18:07","slug":"drawn-to-travel-is-now-taking-orders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/2026\/03\/17\/drawn-to-travel-is-now-taking-orders\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawn to Travel is now taking orders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I am very excited that you can now just click order on this website, and every map I send to production makes me smile. It has been a fairly long journey getting to this point \u2014 and hopefully, the project still has a longer journey ahead of itself. I want to use this blog post to tell the story of Drawn to Travel in a bit more detail <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memorialising my memories<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The story of Drawn to Travel goes back to 2021. Throughout the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was reminiscing about the beautiful train journeys I had taken in the years before. I thought to myself that it would be really cool to memorialise them on my wall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I searched the market for maps of the European rail networks, but couldn’t find what I was looking for: a beautiful, yet complete map of the entire continent. There were some, but they looked very much like a road atlas. And I believe train travel is way more poetic than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I took to the internet to search for data to build my own. I was lucky, quickly finding that the people at OpenStreetMap are as diligent mapping rail tracks as they are with any other piece of infrastructure and the natural environment. I was able to produce the first prototype.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
The first prototype of the Drawn to Travel map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Turning rail Spaghetti into wall art<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While was a nice proof of concept, I realised that it won’t be super useful for the purpose intended: tracking my journeys across Europe. The lines were too dense. Too jittery. And too much like tangled-up Spaghetti. I knew the data would need some serious cleaning and design work to become useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I was finishing up my dissertation, writing about public discourse concerning the climate crisis, I had to postpone work on the map for a while. After obtaining my degree I let myself get drawn into working at a major research university, and all but forgot about the map. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But after a little while of doing more research, the project came back to me, and it wouldn’t let me go anymore. In late 2023, I started work on the maps in earnest, developing the code needed to make them true pieces of art. In a future post I will write a bit more about all the steps involved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspiring others to travel sustainably<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Next to some fairly intense coding and design work, I started to think about how to turn this idea into an actual business. Part of me never wanted to do this, feeling content that I had made something beautiful for myself. But I realised that I hoped that I could inspire others with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve learned quite a lot about printing techniques, about branding and marketing, and about how difficult it can be to maintain a steady presence on social media. It is still the part of the work that I find most taxing, noticing the mental health impacts it can have. Luckily, I have support in that area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the first products ready to order, I feel committed to trying to make Drawn to Travel a commercial success as well. It’s been a passion project throughout the past years, and always will be. But I do believe in the beauty of train travel, and in the beauty of what I have created. And I think it’s worth sharing that with the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My work on Drawn to Travel started in earnest in late 2023, and I am extremely pleased how far it’s come since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2203,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"both","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":301,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nicht-kategorisiert"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2114"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2217,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions\/2217"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drawntotravel.eu\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}