Most map art worth hanging starts with one street. Perhaps it's the block where you rented your first place, the one with the radiator that banged all winter. Perhaps it's the town you couldn't wait to leave and now, a little annoyingly, miss. A map can hold that kind of memory without saying a word about it, and I suspect that's why so many people now put one up where a print of a famous painting used to hang.

For a long time maps on walls belonged to popes and rich merchants. Digital mapping changed that. There is now enough data to draw almost any street on earth sharply enough for a poster, in colors that suit your room, with your own words underneath. Studios such as Say Aww let you design a custom map of your hometown, or of the corner where you met someone, and print it to hang the way you'd hang a family photo. It's part keepsake and part design object. That mix goes a long way toward explaining why city map prints and map wall art keep turning up in American homes.

Artists got there first

None of this is news to artists, who have treated maps as pictures for centuries.

Giambattista Nolli spent more than a decade surveying Rome before he engraved his plan of the city in 1748, on twelve copper plates. He inked the buildings dark and left the streets and squares white. The insides of churches are white too, so on paper you can walk off the street and straight into the Pantheon. Architects still call a plan drawn this way a Nolli map. You can buy his Rome as a print today, and it looks good above a desk.

Jasper Johns went for the most ordinary map in America. In 1961 he took the outline of the states that kids color in at school and blew it up across a canvas about ten feet wide. He stenciled in the state names, then let the paint run over them until some borders nearly disappear. MoMA owns it now. Sixty-odd years on, it still looks a little rebellious.

Alighiero Boetti didn't paint his maps at all. In 1971 he started having Afghan embroiderers stitch world maps with every country filled in by its own flag, and the work carried on until he died in 1994. Each piece froze the borders of the years it took to sew. The designer Paula Scher went another way and has spent decades painting maps out of hand-lettered place names, crowded and gloriously wrong.

What do these pieces of map artwork have in common? Mostly the plain pleasure of looking at a map as a pattern. Custom map art borrows that and adds the one thing no museum can give you, which is streets you've actually walked.

What makes a personalized map different

A poster from a big-box store tends to show a skyline everybody already knows. A personalized map starts with a spot you choose and a view you set.

You can go wide and take in a whole city. Or zoom right in on one neighborhood, a college campus, the lake you spent summers on, a single address. Pulled back, a city stops reading as streets and turns into texture, and the coastline or the river does most of the design work. Close in, you can trace the walk to the coffee shop you went to every morning for three years.

Then you add words. Not many.

A title, maybe a date or the coordinates, and the map becomes a record of something that happened there.

How to design a custom city map poster

Most online map poster editors walk you through roughly the same steps, and a few of them deserve more care than people give them.

Frame the place generously. Search the city or the exact address, then drag and zoom until the streets you care about sit inside the poster with a bit of air around them. Crop too tight and it ends up looking like a screenshot.

Pick colors for the room, not for the screen. Deep navy works next to warm wood in a living room. Cream or sage keeps a bedroom quiet. Black and white is the safe bet for a gallery wall that's already full of photos.

Go easy on the text. A name and a date nearly always beat a whole sentence.

If one exact spot matters, mark it with a small heart, a house or a pin. That could be the first apartment, the chapel, or the hospital where a baby was born.

After that you choose a size and a format. Most shops offer an unframed print, a framed poster, a print on a wood hanger, or a digital file you print yourself.

Size and frames

Size is the easy thing to get wrong. A 12 x 16 inch poster suits a desk wall, a shelf or a hallway, and it works well in a cluster of several cities. At 18 x 24 inches it can hold the wall over a dresser or a reading chair. The 24 x 36 inch print is the one for above a bed or a loveseat.

Designers often go by a simple rule: art over furniture should be about two-thirds as wide as the piece below it, with 8 to 10 inches of wall in between. Over a long sofa, two or three posters in a row usually look better than one big one.

Hanging a Seattle map print in a natural oak frame.

As for frames, keep them plain. A thin black, white or natural oak frame lets the lines do the work, and a custom map print that arrives framed can go up the same day. Ornate frames just fight with all that detail. A wood hanger, with wooden rails held on by magnets and a string to hang it from, feels more relaxed and suits a nursery. If you'd rather print it yourself, a high-resolution digital file is handy for the birthday you remembered the night before.

Map art as a gift

A map is one of the few gifts that's about a person and a place at once. A few that tend to go down well:

A first home map print of the new address, with a little house on the spot and the move-in date underneath. It'll still be on the wall long after the housewarming flowers have gone.

A where we met map for a wedding or an anniversary, centered on the campus or the bar or the street corner, with the date in small type under the title.

A hometown poster for someone who has moved away, or for a graduation. Two places can share one poster too, for example the city where a couple met and the one they live in now. And for a new baby there's the city where they were born, in soft colors, for the nursery wall.

Nolli needed a decade and twelve copper plates to get Rome onto paper. These days the hard part is choosing which street.