The Miami posterA Miami poster in a white frame, on a pale turquoise wall, in hard bright light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Miami poster, drawn from the real map

25.7617°N / 80.1918°W · United States

Half of this sheet is water, and almost everything you see out there was put there on purpose.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Miami poster

What the map shows

A bay crossed by straight lines, and an island that was made

Start with the rectangle. That is the port, and it is not a piece of shoreline that was tidied up: it is an island of dredged fill, laid in the bay in the nineteen sixties and enlarged by swallowing two neighbouring islets. Its right angles against the soft edge of the water are the giveaway. Then look at the causeways, three of them running dead straight from the mainland to the island, one of them threading a chain of small artificial islands on the way, and a fourth curving south to reach the keys.

Read on

Two things the map will not tell you, and both matter. The island on the right is not a district of Miami: Miami Beach is a separate city, and so are Coral Gables and Hialeah further inland. And the wide water in the middle is not the ocean but a bay; the Atlantic is on the far side of the barrier island, out of the frame. The one line here that nobody designed is the diagonal cutting in from the left to meet the water below the centre. That is the river, and it is the reason the city is where it is.

Compose your own

What suits Miami

The palette

Blue commands here, so let it: a wide light blue for the bay, cut by the white lines of the causeways. Keep the mainland a dense pale grey grid with very little green, and save the green for Key Biscayne and the golf courses on the island, where it means something. Treat the port as frank geometry, quays and basins at right angles, like a piece brought in from elsewhere. That is exactly what it is, and letting it look softer than the natural shoreline would be the one real mistake available here.

The framing

Vertical, although the bay reads east to west and suggests a wide format. The reason is the island: it runs north to south for miles, and the portrait is what holds its whole length beside the mainland. Put downtown roughly a third in from the left, where the river reaches the water, and let Key Biscayne anchor the bottom. Come in closer and you gain the streets but lose the causeways at both ends, and with them the fact that this city and its beach are joined only by lines that somebody had to build.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A causeway, a street number, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Miami into your plan of Miami.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1896A woman traded half her land for a railway

Julia Tuttle settled in 1891 on the north bank of the Miami River, and persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway down to her land by giving him half of her six hundred and forty acres, along with ground for a station and a hotel. The first train came in April 1896, and on 28 July the electors, five hundred and two of them registered, voted to incorporate. The city on this map is younger than most of the buildings in the European cities in this collection.

1912The island was farmland before it was a resort

Miami Beach began as an agricultural estate on a barrier island. John Collins had a canal dredged across it in 1912, and that cut is still on the map today. He then started a wooden bridge to the mainland, finished in 1913 with money from Carl Fisher and reckoned the longest wooden bridge in the world at the time. The village incorporated on 26 March 1915 and became a city on 1 May 1917. The straight causeways you see now are its descendants, the timber having long since given way to a chain of made islands and concrete.

1960The port is an island that did not exist

Flagler’s private wharves at the edge of downtown passed to the city and then to the county in 1960, and from 1964 a terminal was built out in the bay on Dodge Island, some three hundred acres of dredged fill. In 1980 the neighbouring Lummus and Sam’s islets were joined to it, making the five-hundred-and-twenty-acre port you can see. It is the most geometric shape on the whole sheet, and the reason is simple: it is the only part of the bay that was drawn before it was made.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Miami

The causeway you took to cross, the side of the bay you woke up on, the bridge where the water opens all at once. The bay is the same for everyone. The way across it is not.

Compose my Miami poster