Day 13: The year I launched MapTheClouds 🌍
2021 was the year everything clicked. I participated in the 30DayMapChallenge, publishing maps daily, and took part in the 30DayChartChallenge along the way. Many days of public creative work overall, intense, messy, and transformative.
That same year I: • Launched maptheclouds.com • Created the MapTheClouds brand and logo • Refined COVID-19 network visualizations for Romania • Started the DatavizRO initiative • Developed Mapstuff (a design system experiment) • Shipped the We Travel planning app
Those challenges taught me something simple: discipline beats waiting for perfect conditions. Some days produced work I’m still proud of. Others were just functional experiments. Both mattered. Showing up builds creative muscle memory.
The real shift, though, was committing publicly to the MapTheClouds identity. Once you put your name on the work, you don’t quietly abandon hard problems. You iterate through them.
By the end of 2021 I didn’t just have projects. I had a practice, a platform, and a direction.
Tomorrow: ten years of tool evolution on the same location.
Year in review viz: 2021 on MapTheClouds · Video: YouTube
Why this day is in the series
Days 1-12 revisit maps and techniques. Day 13 is the origin story of the practice: public cadence, brand, platform. It is not a tutorial day. It is context for everything that follows, including Day 14’s ten-year tool stack on the same place.
2021 milestones (from the post)
| Thread | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Challenges | 30DayMapChallenge + 30DayChartChallenge |
| Platform | maptheclouds.com live |
| Identity | Brand and logo |
| Community / RO | DatavizRO; COVID-19 Romania networks refined |
| Experiments | Mapstuff design system; We Travel app |
How to follow
- Blog: blog.maptheclouds.com
- LinkedIn: Day 13 post
- Live viz: 2021 year in review
- Previous: Day 12 – Projected time zones
- Hashtag: #100DayMapChallenge
#100DayMapChallenge · Day 13/100 · 2021 year in review · LinkedIn