A planned city deserves a drawn map
Adelaide was laid out on paper before it was built, and it still reads best as a drawing: a square mile of streets, a belt of parkland, a second grid across the river. Pixel Adelaide takes the building outlines that local OpenStreetMap volunteers have traced, raises each one to its recorded number of storeys and renders the whole thing as a single isometric scene. No satellite tiles and no stock icons — just the shape of the city, with every business standing in the building it really occupies.
What is drawn
Where the map starts and stops
Greater Adelaide runs seventy kilometres from Gawler to Sellicks Beach, and most of it is single-storey suburb that would draw as a plain of identical boxes. So the map is built around the part of the city that has shape: the square mile and North Adelaide inside the Park Lands, the terrace and villa suburbs that grew along the old tram routes — Norwood and Kent Town, Unley and Hyde Park, Prospect, Thebarton and Hindmarsh — the Torrens down to Henley Beach, and the tram line out to Glenelg with the beach strip either side of it. Magill and the hills face mark the eastern edge; Mitcham the southern one. It is a chosen boundary rather than a council line, and it can grow (Port Adelaide is the obvious next piece) as the data justifies it.
Every fact has a source
Nothing on the map is invented. Each card says where its details came from and when they were last refreshed; owners can correct their own listing, and corrections to the underlying map go back to the open datasets rather than staying here.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. South Australian government datasets are used under their published Creative Commons terms and credited on the pages that use them.
How the drawing works
The engine is written from scratch for this purpose — a canvas renderer with no mapping library behind it. Each suburb is exported as a chunk of tiles; buildings keep their real outlines and are extruded storey by storey, roofs follow the shape tagged in OpenStreetMap, and the painter's order is worked out by height so the towers on King William Street hide what stands behind them. Light's grid runs true north, which suits an isometric view unusually well: the blocks sit square on the tiles with no compromise. A building with twenty tenants shows a ×20 badge, and one click opens the whole building. After sunset, Adelaide time, the map switches to its night palette on its own.
Who makes it
Pixel Adelaide is made by Grigory Frolov, a web developer and digital marketer who has spent twenty years building things for the browser and writes about the city on the blog from the map's point of view. There are no adverts, no trackers and no paid placements; verified owners rank first because they have confirmed their details, not because they paid. Ideas, corrections or a story worth telling? Get in touch.
Own a shop, cafe or practice in Adelaide?
Look for it on the map — it is probably already there. Claiming is free: we send a link to the email address your business already publishes, or you drop a small badge on your own website to prove it is yours. Verified owners get the green tick, a photo gallery, opening hours, links and first place in every list they appear in.
Claim your business — freeSomething not right?
Every listing carries a “Spotted an error?” link. Reports go to a person, not a queue, and the fix is made where the data lives so every map that uses it improves. For anything else, send a message.