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Pre-Pinning Google Maps

November 18, 2019 — Originally published on Medium

When we took over the site of our micro-amusement park in downtown Los Angeles, we couldn’t get over the size of the building. We wanted to fill it to the brim with experiences inside and out and the question kept coming up of what to do with the roof?! It’s the length of the city block so we had some serious space to work with. A garden for the kitchen? A deck for headquarters? Then it dawned on us. Paint a Google Maps pin big enough that it might just pre-pin everyone’s map when they update the satellite imagery. The Downtown LA Arts District is gathering some real momentum and we loved the idea of helping folks find where it is. So we got to work. Finished result and details of the process below.

UPDATE March 31, 2021: After 18 months, Google Maps updated their satellite imagery and we’re live!

UPDATE December 15, 2021: We Won a Clio Award!

Thank you!

Huge thanks to the team at Montage Paint for believing in this project from the beginning. They have an incredible company upcycling unused paint and refurbishing it for new uses.
Incredible artist/creative Grant Delgatty led the charge and saw it all the way through. Thank you Grant!
It could not have happened without the incredible volunteer “pin pals” that toiled all day on a Saturday. Thank you Kristina Boudreau, Sonia Castro, Katherine Lu, Joshua Ishihara, Dustin Rael, Joel Turner, Jill Smolin, Claire Nguyen, Erin Dean, Allison Lyons, Will Kistler, Julian Basurto, Salman Shah, Joshua Ishihara, Hunter Weiss, Leah Hanes and Mya Stark!

Behind the Scenes

For this trick to work, we needed to angle the pin and the words to be angled perfectly north/south. Because our building isn’t perfectly N/S we needed a little math to get the offset just right so that when satellites update the images, it appears like a normal pin.

The original rendering created by our creative director Hector Alvarez
Updated rendering mindful of all the new A/C units we had to add to the park.
The empty building just as we started power washing all the buildup
The building was gridded into 10'x10' squares so we could estimate the proper placement of each element
Chalk lines for the grid
Painting begins!
By lunchtime we had a finished pin
But the color wasn’t quite right.
So we live re-mixed the paint on the roof, pouring black and red into orange until it was as close as can be
The new color once it dried happened to match Two Bit’s brand colors!
Much better
And we’re done!

Originally published at https://brentbushnell.medium.com/pre-pinning-google-maps-f1bff5a26392