An isometric pixel map of Evanston, Illinois
Every building here is a real footprint, extruded to its measured height and drawn from the southeast at a fixed angle, so the lake sits in the foreground and north points up and to the right. Footprints come from OpenStreetMap where it has them and from Overture Maps (Microsoft's ML-traced outlines) elsewhere; most heights are lidar measurements carried by Overture.
Houses wear what the Cook County Assessor has on file: brick, frame, stucco or frame over masonry, with shingle, slate, tile or flat tar-and-gravel roofs. Street trees come from the City of Evanston inventory, sized by trunk diameter, and in autumn each one turns the color its species turns.
What is invented: the exact wall and roof colors, windows, the materials of anything that is not a house or small apartment building, and the yard, park and campus trees, which are scattered at random. Each house takes the Assessor record of the county parcel it stands on; where a lot has more than one building, the one whose size and height fit the recorded living area is taken as the house, so now and then a coach house wears the main house's siding. ML-traced outlines are rougher than hand-mapped ones.
The lake moves by palette cycling, the trick 1990s games used: the water is painted once and only its colors rotate.
drag pan scroll / pinch zoom R random H whole city F fullscreen / search. Hover or tap anything to see its name.
A homage to Tiny València and Isometric NYC. Those repaint photogrammetry with an image model; this one is a small software rasterizer running in your browser.