In Pachmarhi, a framed 1912 Survey of India sheet on a hotel wall would not let me go. By evening it was an interactive page; within a day the whole state had followed as a family atlas. This is the brief that process taught me — for the next map that stops you somewhere.
The heart of it is a fidelity contract: divide the sheet into what gets traced — names, heights, roads, scale, the graticule — and what gets stylised and admitted to, like terrain texture no one can honestly reproduce from a photograph. The recreation states this division on the page itself. The paper original stays the authority; the page is the toy that teaches you to read it.
Everything else follows from two inputs only you can give: close-up photographs — title block, legend, corners, and the margin fine-print where the date always hides — and one sentence on why the map stopped you. My second, better photo of the Pachmarhi sheet is what unlocked the 1912 printing code, the full legend, and Forsyth Point; the first alone would have produced a guess.
- Study the sheet first and report back — agency, scale, date, legend, key — correcting the owner's assumptions out loud. (Mine was "some British geologist's work." It was the Survey of India, and the correction became the best part of the page.)
- Keep the sheet's material truth: its paper, lettering and inks, with dark mode as the map room at night — the chrome darkens, the sheet stays paper.
- The drill-down: detail arrives with zoom, a clickable key that flies to each place, layer toggles, and a live scale bar in the sheet's own units.
- A teaching layer — the five or six things you'd point at to teach someone to read this sheet, written for a named person, not for cartographers.
- Artifact first, site later — play with it against the real sheet before it earns a URL.
Copy it whole. Attach your photographs where it asks, fill in the why, and paste into Claude Code.
Attached are photographs of an old printed map — a survey sheet, a pictorial atlas page, a cantonment plan. Recreate it as an interactive web page I can explore and teach from. You are not copying the artwork; you are rebuilding the sheet's *idea* in a form that can be panned, zoomed and questioned. ## What I am sending with this brief - One straight-on, full-frame photograph in good light. - Close-ups of: the title block, the legend, the key or index if there is one, all four corners (the graticule numbers live there), and the bottom margin — the scale bar and the printing code, which is where the date hides. - One or two sentences on why this map stopped me, and who the page is for. If my photographs are missing any of these, ask for them before you start. The difference between a recreation and a guess is usually one close-up. ## Step 0 — study the sheet before drawing anything Read everything legible and report it back to me first: the mapping agency, the scale and its units, the geographic extent, the printing date, the legend entries, the key of named places. Fact-check the sheet's own story — who made it, in what tradition, and correct my assumptions out loud. (I once had a Survey of India sheet down as "some British geologist's work." The correction became the best part of the page.) ## Step 1 — the fidelity contract Divide the sheet into what you will TRACE and what you will STYLISE, and put that division on the finished page in plain words. - **Trace** everything checkable: place names, spot heights, the road and rail network, symbols, water, the graticule, the scale, the frame. - **Stylise** what cannot be honestly reproduced — terrain texture, hachures, contour fields. Generate them to evoke the original's hand, and say so. - The paper original stays the authority. The page is the toy that teaches you to read it. ## Step 2 — the sheet's material truth Keep its identity: the paper colour, the lettering conventions, the ink palette, the border and neatlines, the legend as an object on the sheet. If my site has an existing map page, make this one its sibling — same page chrome, same "atlas corner" idiom. Dark mode is the map room at night: the chrome darkens, the sheet stays paper. It is an object, like a framed print. ## Step 3 — the drill-down - Pan and zoom (drag, wheel, pinch). Detail must ARRIVE with depth — big names at arm's length, spot heights and minor names only when you lean in, the way a real sheet rewards a magnifying glass. - A clickable key of named places: tap a name, the map flies there and opens a small card with that place's story. - Layer toggles: terrain, water, roads, names, grid. - A live scale bar in the sheet's own units, recomputed as I zoom — "one inch of screen is now N yards" is the sentence that makes scale real. ## Step 4 — the teaching layer Below the map, the five or six things I would point at to teach someone to read this sheet: its scale trick, what its contour or terrain marks mean, its symbols and abbreviations, its measurement story (triangulation, chains, whatever its tradition used), its units. Write them for the person named in the brief, not for cartographers. ## Where it lives Build it as a private artifact first so I can play with it and correct you against the real sheet. Port it to the site only when I say so — and then with the full house registration: sitemap, generated surfaces, share card, cross-links to its sibling pages. ## Rules - Never reproduce the original artwork of an in-copyright map. Facts, names, geography and conventions are free; the drawing must be your own. - Every claim on the page must be traced from the photographs or verified independently. Where you cannot read the sheet, leave it out — do not invent plausible details in an old map's voice. - Keep my "why" in the page. Without it this is a demo; with it, it is mine. ## Traps that cost time - Page-level design tokens colliding with the site stylesheet's tokens — a heading can silently render invisible in one theme. Name the map page's tokens uniquely and test BOTH themes before calling it done. - Dense name clusters collide when labels are placed by formula. Support per-label overrides (anchor, offset) from the start. - The printing date is almost never in the title — it is in the margin fine-print. So are the surveyor's disclaimers, which are often the most human thing on the sheet. - A second, better photograph halfway through is normal. Ask for it early; it will unlock names and dates the first one blurred. ## Report back 1. Everything you read off the sheet in step 0, and what you corrected. 2. The trace/stylise division as it will appear on the page. 3. Screenshots in both themes, at rest and mid-zoom. 4. What you could not read or verify, listed — not silently omitted.
curl, or for pasting without the page around it.
The step that matters most is step 0 — let it read the sheet and report before anything gets drawn, and answer its requests for better photographs instead of pressing on. And when the recreation is done, stand in front of the real map and try to catch it being wrong. That is not a flaw in the process; on this site, it is the process.
If a sheet teaches you a trap this brief doesn't list, tell me — maps have been humbling people for centuries and there is no reason to stop now.