VICE CITY GUIDES


January 2016 – What do you get when you mix a little bit of hipster culture with Google Maps? The answer is VICE’s City Guides.

THE BACKSTORY 

VICE and Google teamed up last fall to produce an exciting, trans-media campaign aimed at millennials with travel guides to eight American cities, a new web series (Streets), and influencer listicles to get tips on the best places and neighborhoods to eat, shop, and play. My role was to provide product expertise on the UX and content creation for the interactive city guide maps. 

The project took inspiration in part from a vision deck I created last year to influence the roadmap for Google's custom mapping tool, My Maps. I posited that shipping features to make custom maps more personal and shareable would lead the way for powerful user-generated content. 

The stars aligned when a handful of product updates over the spring and summer put My Maps in a position to do just that with the VICE project. Meanwhile, I had created a few examples to showcase how creators and brands could produce compelling My Maps using custom iconography, rich media and editorial content—tactics which inspired the VICE guides.  

CITY GUIDES 

The first city guide, New York City, was published in December and followed by Los Angeles in January. Curated by VICE’s editorial team, on them you'll find the hidden gems and hole-in-the-walls absent from typical travel guides. Though what makes this execution truly unique is the functionality to save the entire guide to your native Google Maps app—a newer My Maps feature sure to grow in awareness with this campaign. 

Here's how it works:

  • Consumers looking for travel tips can explore the city guides on VICE's site
  • By tapping the ★ for a given map, they'll save that city's guide to their native Google Maps app
  • These maps will appear in the side menu under "Your places," with directions to any POI just a tap away

Look out for the Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas, Austin, Atlanta and San Francisco city guides coming early 2016.