2016 GeoHipster holiday gift guide

The holiday season is now well and truly upon us, and with it the pressure of giving relevant gifts. While you’ve of course long since lovingly wrapped the Null Island t-shirt as a gift to yourself, you may still be on the hunt for gifts befitting of your geo friends. Fear not, GeoHipster is here to help.

It’s our pleasure to present a completely subjective list of the most geohip gifts.

In reverse order of most hip:

10. The Society for Printable Geography 3D prints jewelry using real satellite data. Get your favorite country’s 3D profile as a pendant for a necklace. We’re not really sure there’s a better way to express geo-love.

9. Telescope Cards. Think print is dead? Well you are dead fucking wrong, my friend. Have a look at Telescope, which lets you make a beautiful deck of custom city guide cards. From the site: “printed at a family-run printer just outside of London. Each and every deck is checked by hand to make sure it’s perfect.” If that’s not geohip, what is?

8. The Atlas of Design, Volume II.  32 beautiful, beautiful maps. In a book. The eyes will bleed, these maps are so pretty.

7. A custom SplashMap. An indestructible, waterproof, fabric map of anywhere in the world thanks to the magical little elves that make OpenStreetMap. So the next time the gang is out mountain biking, instead of faffing about with your phone that has no battery and even less signal, you’ll be plowing into mud and then wiping your face with your map. That, dear friends, is geohip.

6. You know what’s hipper than an amazing map? An amazing map MADE OUT OF WOOD.  Feast your eyes on 3d Wood Maps by Bella Maps.

5. What about that friend of yours who loves getting drunk and ranting map design, but then always turns the discussion into a debate about typography and font design? Well, cross his name off the gift list, because this is it: Typographic Maps from axismaps.

4. Remember up above when I said print isn’t dead? It’s still not. Point your browser over to Mapiful and feast your eyes on these beautiful printed map posters of any town. Which wall wouldn’t look better with one of those on it?

3. MapOnShirt.com – there is no reason to be subtle with your domain name when you are this damn geohip.

2. Can it really already be over a decade since OpenStreetMap was just you, Steve, and the cool kids? Sad, but true. But don’t get all down just yet, you can relive the adventure with The Book of OSM, in which Steve Coast (GeoHipster interview here) interviews 15 different people from the early days of the neogeo, crowd-sourcing revolution.

1. And finally, we close with the best possible geohip gift: the 2016 GeoHipster calendar. A hand-curated, non-digital, Gregorian calendar to hang on the wall. In the age of mass-customization and drop shipping we can’t claim supplies are limited, but we can truthfully claim it is a thing of beauty that your giftee will enjoy every single day of the year (including 2016’s leap day!). Order now and support the GeoHipster cause.

Happy holidays to one and all. Stay hip.