A bunch of people have made scratch maps; my goal when I was approached by the people at Learning Inspirations was to make a really good world map within the design constraints of the medium. Those constraints are (essentially) that important text has to be kept away from the edge of the scratch-off foil layer, and this makes labeling a challenge, especially when you really want to have the kind of intensive labeling I think is normal for a world political map. The client and I went round and round, trying to milk every bit of quality we could out of the process while battling international communication and technical challenges with the manufacturer. It was worth it; I’m very pleased with how the final printed piece turned out! It’s available on Amazon here.

For these two images, you can compare scratch-off and scratched-off versions using the slider.