My mother, the ultimate hustler, grossed like ~$2m selling small business advice. Her small business: selling small business advice. Very meta. I discovered this 22-year-old unopened idea-a-day desk calendar and it inspired me to write some “great ideas.” Remember: one solid trial is worth a billion “great ideas.”
- Tasting room maps for vineyards; wine is all about terroir, terrain. An oversized varnished wooden CNC’d topo map perhaps? The drunks will love touching it.
- Pick a patch of land you care about. Spend a few hours per month creating a luscious, baroque map of same. It’s important for the cartographer to have show-pieces that reflect your taste and talents.
- Fabricate and rent out a map dancefloor; you take metal 3x3ft trays, lay LEDs in the bottom, then the map layer, then a top layer of thick safety glass. What wedding could resist?
- Make high-throughput maps for academic publishers; $300 a pop, sort em out fast (talk to the art director first), the PhDs will recommend you to their colleagues.
- Make high-throughput looks-okay maps for powerpoint presentations; big companies love these. You just gotta get their point fast and keep it simple and readable.
- Map kitchen table; glazed super tight and hose-downable, bamboo/cellulosic barrier between the plastic and your potables.
- Map alarm clock; face is a nice glowy map. maybe 7×9″, takes up a nightstand but looks nice
- Map bookshelf; individual sealed plates to swap out, tough scratch-resistant lucite or celluloid
- Map lamp; adhere to a lampshade, maybe sandwich between fabric. Would be a great nightlight.
- Map escritoire; our deluxe model features a 190k x 250k E-ink display, hand-stained walnut encased in the toughest varnish, backlit by our user-serviceable fault-tolerant lighting core. It’s your map.
- Local map booth: print vintage maps of your local area, add to thrifted frames, sell for $20 each at your local farmer’s market or craft fair.
- Classroom map: you know those big rolled pull-down maps of the continents? You could update those.
- Map baton: 6 sided, what tarmac gate guys wave or smaller, laminate micron-scale map into interior of fine glass, two knobs scrolls thru hues + intensity.
- Map nightlight: 4×3″ micron-scale backlit map: an imagined place, the kingdom of sleeping 9 hours like a rock
- Multimaterial map: the USA is CNC’d gold depicting real terrain, Mexico is hand-beaten copper depicting real terrain, Guatemala is a knot of ruby depicting real terrain, pacific ocean a foot of glass smothering ridges ground out of sandstone
- Emboridered map: start stitching, make it a yard long like clara bowe, you can’t beat threads for texture
- map lava lamp: start with a blacked-out lamp, etch out map, illuminates nicely, shifting colors….whats bad
- Map tunnel: Lightboxes on all surfaces, mount polyester or film maps or monochrome LCD screens, great for expensive transition zones in commercial real estate, events.
- Stamped copper map: columbiapressworks.com beat you but hey try your hand
- Maps on coasters: hope they’re at least as good as https://www.etsy.com/shop/allmappedout
- Glowing map + recipes of the area; copy em down and try em in the kitchen
- Map ziggurat: mound up Getty-style marble, leaving a square shaft in the middle. You hit the top and you’re walking atop water-clear fused quartz; look down 20 feet, maps interleaved with more glass. Lit from below with low-presh sodium-style light. 90-deg mirrored telescopes on casters to peer down. What’s buried in there…..
- land/garden map: find a rich landowner or estate, make a beautiful bird’s-eye, top-down, or oblique of their land, stuff with illos like https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/9be2e54a1e4cb74ea60824ff14bb558aa030cfe2bb65370bce55b1777a96f03e/Neil-Gower_Naumkeag.jpg
- Map tutorials: sell a series of .AI files with a complete, labeled, pretty 10×10″ map on the right, unstyled QGIS output on the left, “make left look like right”
