Three printed Boxi flyers fanned out, mock-up
The Boxi map on a red shop ledge, next to a crate of free tampons
A stack of Boxi maps on a wooden bench
Two people on a bench at Boxhagener Platz reading the Boxi map
Boxi map mock-up: a stack of printed square flyers, the back side next to it
Icon sheet with all hand-drawn motifs of the Boxi map
Two shop owners hold up the Boxi map in front of their shop
Red and lilac illustrations from the map: T-shirt, glasses, cherry, heart, cinema seats, bodysuit, chili, shopping bags, pizza
A pug lying next to the Boxi map on a wooden floor
Shop owner waves the Boxi map in the window of Victoria met Albert
The Boxi map on a wooden shelf between notebooks

BOXI

Every Kiez has a secret map, carried around in the heads of those who live there. Boxi puts it on paper: 31 independent shops around Boxhagener Platz in Berlin-Friedrichshain, gathered on one illustrated square sheet. The initiative came from Bianca of hAusen and Myrre of Frieda Hain, two shops where I worked as a sales assistant during my studies. Frieda Hain has a very analogue feel, and part of it was that we hand-lettered our own price tags. Myrre liked my lettering style so much that she asked me to illustrate the map.

The map lives where people pick it up: as a tear-off pad on counters, shelves and tables, and in shop windows, free to take. It travels from there, folded into pockets, read on a bench at Boxhagener Platz, passed on to friends who are visiting.

The map is an abstraction, not a city plan. The street grid is reduced to the axes people actually walk, drawn as broad, dry brush strokes instead of ruled lines. Each shopping street has its own colour, and the numbered dots take it on: a shop is found by its street first, by its number second. U-Bahn, S-Bahn, tram and bus stops are the only standardised signs.

Everything else is drawn by hand. The first sketches went into a Moleskine notebook with a Smart Pen, which records every stroke digitally while it is drawn. In Illustrator they became the final line work: a loose contour with hatching instead of gradients, filled with flat colour that does not quite meet the line. A moka pot, a slice of cake, cinema seats and popcorn, a cargo bike, the pigeon on Krossener Straße. The imperfection is deliberate: the map should look as if it was made in the Kiez, not for it.

The type is Cy Text, warm enough to sit next to the drawings and clear enough for street names at small sizes. I designed the map alongside my full-time job, as a homage to Boxi, my home for almost twelve years.

FAQ

The pen reads an invisible code printed on every page of the Smart Notebook and uses it to locate each stroke exactly. While I draw, it sends the line work in real time to the Moleskine Notes app. Without a connection it stores up to 1,000 pages and syncs them later.

Every sketch therefore exists twice: as ink on paper and as a digital drawing that keeps the speed and pressure of the hand. I exported the sketches as vector files and refined them in Illustrator.

In clear steps, together with Bianca of hAusen and Myrre of Frieda Hain.

First we defined the colour world, so that each shopping street got its own tone. Then I developed an illustration style that holds 31 very different shops together, from optician to florist. For each shop I chose a motif and agreed it with the owners. Before printing, I checked street names, positions and stops against the city map.

The biggest task was to convince many stakeholders at once and still find one visual language that works for all of them.

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