animated tourism map for Halifax County, VA Tourism Dept.Created as part of the Halifax County Tourism rebranding.

For as long as we've been working with the tourism office, director Linda Shepperd has wished for some type of animation that would let visitors "drive" around the county to discover things. Cost, not wishing to use Flash, practicality of the feature, and several other factors always stood in the way.

custom illustrated map for tourism marketingUsing animation that requires no special browser plugins, Creative Director and illustrator Erin Brown came up with a concept to treat the project like a theme park map. Since it's developed with html, css and javascript, it can be displayed on all devices and doesn't require special software to be installed on the site visitor's device. (Flash requires Flash Player to be installed on the visitors's computer or other device, and it can't even be installed on iPhone and iPad.)

The concept eliminated our having to make everything geographically correct and the need to include everything but the kitchen sink in the illustration. Elements of the illustration can also help build the foundation for sector marketing materials.

When a visitor clicks on a feature in the illustration, the car drives to the feature and a summary of that tourism sector is displayed. The visitor can either click through to that section of the site or close the information to view other sector info in the map.