By that time, sales of its signature product, a spiral-bound Twin Cities street atlas that was once required reading of every cabdriver in town, had fallen from 100,000 to 10,000 copies a year. The Hudson Map Co., which was founded in 1892 in Minneapolis, closed its retail shop in Minneapolis in 2011. Now that number is down to about 720,000. Minnesota used to print out 1 million copies of the official state highway map every two years. “We used to ship pallets and pallets of maps like these,” said Hedberg of a Twin Cities street map that he publishes. Even Hedberg admits he uses a smartphone to get to an unfamiliar address. Now everyone can summon directions from a device they carry in their pockets.Īs a result, the demand for paper street maps began to drop. In 2005, Google Maps was launched, followed by the iPhone in 2007. GPS devices that people installed in their cars soon followed.
Department of Defense allowed civilian access to accurate GPS data. In 1996, the online mapping service called MapQuest was launched, allowing people to print out custom maps and directions from their computer. Hedberg continued to publish maps even as technology began to change the way we navigate. He didn’t, so that became the first map the college math major created and published. A customer asked if he had a map of the Minneapolis lake district. Hedberg, 55, first got into maps when he and his wife, Jennifer Shea Hedberg, opened the Latitudes Map and Travel store in south Minneapolis in 1987, selling maps and travel books created by other publishers. “People are fascinated with putting geographic context on any kind of information,” said Hedberg, who also makes custom wall-sized maps. Other theme maps followed, looking at the cultural geography of Santa, baseball and love. Hedberg’s “Titanic Reference Map” later became a National Geographic publication. When the 1997 blockbuster film “Titanic” came out, the Borders bookstore asked Hedberg if the famous shipwreck could be mapped. “Hedberg is a master of cartography, of making a good-looking map and creating a map that people will want,” said Ted Florence, president of the International Map Industry Association.īut some of Hedberg’s maps are just for imaginary journeys. Thanks to Hedberg’s national “Baseball Travel Map,” you can scout out your road trip to the New Mexico minor-league home fields of the Roswell Invaders or the Albuquerque Isotopes. “I give them to every single one of my clients.” “I haven’t found anything else like it online,” said Sue Luse, an Eagan-based consultant to students planning college applications.
Another that shows the location of every university and college in the country. He has a line of college town street and campus maps. “Our fingers are in a lot of mapping in the Twin Cities,” Hedberg said. (A paper version is being handed out in downtown hotels.) Hedberg also created a custom map for the ESPN website devoted to the X Games in Minneapolis this weekend. “They flew off the table,” said Brian Kleist, who does marketing for Affiliated Emergency Veterinary Service, which commissioned the map. The map he made of Twin Cities dog parks and dog-friendly breweries was a hit at the Twin Cities Pride Festival last month. Many of the maps Hedberg creates are custom-designed as marketing or promotional giveaways 150,000 for Meet Minneapolis, 50,000 for the Nice Ride bike sharing system, 10,000 handed out at the Minneapolis Radisson Blu hotel. Need to find the nearest ice arena? Boat access point? Where there have been UFO sightings in North Dakota? There’s a Hedberg map for that. He has a pocket map that shows the location, hours and number of stalls in all of the Twin Cities farmers markets. “Sales in the traditional map industry took a huge hit.”īut Hedberg’s northeast Minneapolis company, Hedberg Maps (), has managed to stay alive by creating niche publications that make old-school paper maps surprisingly handy. “There’s no question there are fewer maps,” said Hedberg. Retail stores that specialized in selling maps and travel guides have gone out of business. The mapmaking industry has shrunk and consolidated.
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