Thinking INSIDE the Box!

Don’t you just love business clichés?  How everything is “sustainable,” in need of business “solutions,” or my favorite, “thinking outside the box?”

Well, in our mural business, the BEST thinking is INSIDE the box – where the box is the rectangle boundary of a nautical chart.  This is because it is within these cartographic parameters that marvelous wall art is created!

However, the reason for today’s article is this: I’m always surprised that many potential clients call and are trying to figure out how to fit the entire chart onto their wall where the height-to-width proportion of their wall is very different than the height-to-width ratio of their desired chart.

The answer: Think Inside the box.

For example, let’s say you live in Connecticut and want Captain’s Harbor to show up in your mural.  You have a nice 8 foot high wall by 16 feet, 1 inches wide.

So you go to the “Getting Started” page of my website, click on “Map-Based Chart Locator” which takes you to a NOAA map where you may zoom in to the area of your interest and click on the purple rectangles which encompass the area you may want to put up on your wall as a mural and gives you the name and number of that chart.  After some examination, you find that NOAA Chart 12367, North Shore of Long Island Sound is perfect – well, sort of.

The problem with this particular chart for your wall is the shoreline is at a 45° angle, and if you use the entire chart, you will have a bunch of uninteresting land in the top left corner and quite a bit of uninteresting water in the lower right corner.

And on top of that, if you use all of the height shown on the chart, it will not fill the wall side to side.

So now you must think inside the box.  You really just want the Captain Harbor area and the shoreline immediately north – that is what is important to you.  Thus, by thinking smaller height-wise, you can fit your wall width-wise. 

Here’s the formula.  Convert the height and width of your wall from feet to inches.  Your wall’s 8’ height x 16’ 1” width is now expressed in inches, 96” x 193”.  Next, divide the smaller number into the bigger number.  This gives you a height-to-width ratio of 1:2.01.

You can print out a copy of your chart and with ruler and pen, calculate the area to cover in your mural, making sure that whatever height you choose, your width will be a tad more than twice the height to keep that ratio intact. 

Or to make it easier, just call me, and we’ll do it together over the phone, using my software.  In just a few minutes, and I’ll send you a picture that looks like this, with your mural area outlined in red:

The Final mural is a more aesthetically pleasing mural than it would be if the entire hart is used.

Result? (1) It fits your wall precisely, and (2) It looks magnificent!  In this case you don’t have excess water, land and the area of interest is just where you want it. 

If you are ready to “think inside to box,” I’m ready to help you “think your chart onto your wall.”