Case Study: Penn Forest Natural Burial Park
Single-source publishing for different formats makes this documentation a cost-effective, accessible and visually appealing solution for finding your way around at Penn Forest Natural Burial Park.
Problem
Penn Forest Natural Burial Park’s map had become outdated and needed to depict the changes taking place across the property.
Lyon Ritchie created a new map, to include the recent developments of additional burial groves, a farm and flower gardens.
It had always been a challenge keeping the park maps dispenser full for visitors, so we proposed a digital solution to help support the printed map.
Our Approach
The new map included office locations, grove boundaries, service roads and footpaths, based on data from Open Street Map, Allegheny County and site surveys.
Site surveys provided by Penn Forest Natural Burial Park were used to geolocate burial groves. GPS was used to map trails leading throughout the park. The base map, painted in watercolor, helped give the map a softer, natural feel.
Solution
Visitors can choose to navigate Penn Forest Natural Burial Park using the interactive map on their GPS-equipped device or with the print-friendly map provided in the dispensers at the park and in PDF format on the website.
Both the printable map, provided as a PDF, and the web map, available on Penn Forest Natural Burial Park’s website, are based on the same data and follow the same design. Minor adjustments were made to account for readability differences between printed matter and information displayed on a small screen.
Visit the online map: https://www.pennforestcemetery.com/map/
Results
We hired Gary to create a couple of maps for us at Penn Forest Natural Burial Park. The maps – one paper copy and an interactive one on our website – are for people who would like to come on a self-guided walking tour of our grounds. Gary was spectacular! He is very knowledgeable, easy to work with, intuitive, and great at explaining all of the steps. He quickly gleaned the aesthetic that we like to portray and worked it into the map without any prompt from us. The result is a beautiful, artistic map that we are very proud to display!