SILVERMAZE

Hi, my name is Derek Reed; I opened the business Silvermaze in the beautiful rural farming community of Wiveliscombe, Somerset on 1st October 2002. Since then it has become synonymous with high quality mapping primarily for tourism and visitor purposes.

 I have a wealth of experience in the mapping industry entering the commercial field of mapping after being involved with GPS during the first Gulf war in 1991. I then worked on large projects with many well-known companies including Shell Petroleum, Lloyds Shipping, Peugeot, Best Western Hotels, RAC and the AA.  I managed to break new ground for the first time by innovatively producing a terrain map with political colouration of the Caribbean, a style later adopted by the Ordnance Survey on their overseas maps.

I became involved with 3D mapping, when for my employers I headed up a team responsible for producing a series of some sixty advertising funded maps in the UK.

 3D Mapping was then all hand-drawn, it took a long time and was quite complicated, so although I could see why, it somewhat irritated me when people referred to it as ‘cartoon mapping’ and was shunned by professionals such as surveyors and architects.  This prompted me together with my Silvermaze colleague Nick Hawkins to design a more factual illustrative mapping style that we now call 3D Modern as opposed to the hand-drawn style 3D Classic. The new design was very popular with the professionals, being commended by the Metropolitan Police and referred to by the Independent Newspaper as ‘the finest example of 21st century 3D Mapping. The Mayfair version was included in an anthology, which illustrated just 150 maps from the thousands produced covering 600 years of London Mapping.

 Nick joined me at Silvermaze at the outset, as did Howard Lewis-Baker and Tracey Fillingham all of whom are still involved today.