Woodcut designs are all over the map
“Anyone who can use
Google Maps can use our tool. … It’s like framing a shot in photography.”
Gabe Smedresman
It all started with a wedding gift. Gabe Smedresman was late in buying a present for two Yale classmates and finally decided to build a woodcut map of the campus.
The map, which illustrated the dormitory and law school where his friends met, turned out so well that Smedresman decided to expand the idea into a commercial venture. Two years after creating that prototype, he’s developed a Web application that allows anyone to design their own wood-inlay map.
Smedresman, 28, is a game designer and software engineer who studied architecture and computer sciences at Yale. He started Woodcut Maps with his fiancee, game producer Catherine Herdlick, 34, and their business partner, oboe player Katie Mordarski, 26.
The maps, which use the same technology that Smedresman developed for that early wedding gift, are built from dozens of laser-cut pieces that are then hand-assembled like jigsaw puzzles. The 40 hardwood veneer options include African mahogany, zebrawood, teak and fir; a different veneer is typically used for each of four elements: roads, landscapes, water and parks.
“Anyone who can use Google Maps can use our tool,” Smedresman said recently in his Mission District home, which doubles as the Woodcut Maps studio. “You go to Google Maps or Openstreetmap, type in the name of a city and then drag the boundaries of the map until you get it right. It’s like framing a shot in photography.”
After the order is placed, Smedresman forwards the information to Alex Thompson, a model maker who laser-cuts the veneers at Pagoda Arts in San Francisco.
The pieces are delivered to Smedresman’s home studio, where Mordarski assembles the maps piece by piece, often using tweezers for the smaller pieces. Some maps take as little as 20 minutes to assemble, others two or three hours.
Mordarski, who met her Woodcut Maps colleagues when her husband worked with Herdlick, also builds reeds for oboes. She sees a relationship: “I’m comfortable working with
very tiny and delicate pieces as a result of years of practice at reed making. In music school, we joked about oboe-reed making being miniature carpentry.”
After the map is assembled, Mordarski uses wood glue to adhere the veneers to a piece of MDF (medium-density fiberboard). Then she powersands the surface to make sure there are no slivers. A coat of clear wood finish enhances the grain.
“We don’t offer framing at the moment,” Smedresman says, “but they look very good framed without glass.” The maps are available in 8 by 8, 5 by 16 and 16 by 20 inches and cost $150 to $500.
Before the business was available publicly in late March, the Woodcut Maps team made approximately 100 maps, mostly for family, friends and friends of friends. Ian Kizu-blair, 29, a game designer, ordered one for a wedding gift.
“My girlfriend and I were trying to figure out what to get them that would be unique and special,” he says. “So we got them a map of Elk, Calif., which is where he proposed to her.
“It took a while to select the woods, but it was fun looking at the different options. You go to the site and pull up the area you want for the map and choose which elements of the map you want to display. Once you have those elements set, you can swap around by clicking on different wood choices.”
His friends loved the map, Kizu-blair says, “because it was very personal. I just ordered a map for another friend’s wedding. It’s a much nicer present than something on a registry.”
For Smedresman, who traveled the world with his parents while growing up, maps and the virtual rendering of space are a lifelong fascination. As far as woodworking, he says, “I majored in architecture, so I joke that it was like majoring in arts and crafts because you end up doing so much model making and assembly. I also built theatrical sets in college.”
At Yale, he adapted the board game Risk into a campus-specific competition. “Over 62 percent of undergrads played it within 10 days of the launch,” he says. In 2009, Smedresman and Herdlick created Scenic Routes, a mobile Web application that builds customized walking routes anywhere in San Francisco.
Developing the Woodcut Maps software was complicated, Smedresman says.
“One of the biggest challenges was determining the exact width of the laser beam. The laser beam actually burns away part of the wood, so if you align the pieces in the software, you’ll wind up having a gap between the pieces that’s the exact width of the laser beam — which wouldn’t look great.
“So you need to do this sort of geometric transformation of the pieces that actually expands them by half of the width of the laser beam. Once the laser beam burns that part away, they end up fitting snugly together. That took a lot of trial and error to get right. About six or seven iterations.”
Woodcut Maps has 180 back orders — including several from Australia and Britain, thanks to a lot of Twitter action and articles written for design and technology blogs.
That’s a lot of work, and yet all three Woodcut Maps partners are working full-time jobs. Smedresman is the co-founder of Meet Gatsby, a mobile app that initiates conversations between people who live near one another and have shared interests. Herdlick works for Sifteo, a game publisher that recently released a family gaming console with multiscreen blocks with sensors. And Mordarski, office manager at a startup, still plays oboe professionally.
Smedresman and Mordarski looked surprised when asked if Woodcut Maps might expand to the point where they’d have to cut back on their day jobs. “That would be a wonderful problem,” Mordarski says.