Cities are archives of their own history. You can read a city’s past in the architecture of its buildings.
I wanted to use that idea to map my career onto an urban landscape. Each company becomes a building — its style, size, and character reflecting that chapter of my professional life.
The style reference was The Urban Sketcher — a book about drawing cities on location with loose ink pen lines and selective watercolor washes.
That hand-drawn, gestural quality felt right. Not a polished diagram, but something that feels observed and lived-in.
Each building sits along a single continuous route, drawn like a Google Maps navigation path flowing clockwise through the city.
I started with Paris — romantic, winding streets felt like a fitting metaphor for a non-linear career.
After a couple of iterations I shifted to London, which gave me the architectural range I needed: industrial warehouses for Big Data Partnership, a gaming complex for PlayStation, a sleek tech HQ for Elastic, and a holiday-themed resort for loveholidays.
The landmarks — Big Ben, The Shard, Tower Bridge — appear in the background, grounding the image in a real place.
Prompts
First attempt - Paris roads style
In the style of The Urban Sketcher — loose ink pen outlines with selective watercolor washes, gestural on-location drawing aesthetic — draw my career as a journey via the roads of a city like Paris from:
2025-Present | loveholidays | Holidays
2022-2025 | Elastic | Enterprise search
2018-2021 | PlayStation | Games
2017-2018 | Skimlinks | Ads
2015-2017 | BenevolentAI | Clinical research
2013-2015 | Big Data Partnership | Big data
Second attempt - Paris city style
Create an isometric aerial view of a career journey through a Paris-like city, styled as a Google Maps directions view. The camera looks down from above at a curved path through narrow streets (like Parisian streets).
IMPORTANT: The path must flow in strict chronological order following these stops in sequence:
- VisualDNA (2013)
- Big Data Partnership (2013)
- BenevolentAI (2015)
- Skimlinks (2017)
- PlayStation (2018)
- Elastic (2022)
- loveholidays (2025)
Show only ONE navigation interface panel in the top-left corner listing these stops in order.
Building style instructions:
- Each stop on the journey should have a building that reflects the company’s theme
- Display the company name prominently on top of each building
- VisualDNA (2013) - Profiling and ads: Modern contemporary building
- Big Data Partnership (2013) - Big data: Old industrial/warehouse style building
- BenevolentAI (2015) - Clinical research: Traditional academic/research institution style
- Skimlinks (2017) - Ads: Transitional modern office building
- PlayStation (2018) - Games: Contemporary entertainment/tech building with gaming aesthetics
- Elastic (2022) - Enterprise search: Modern tech headquarters with sleek design
- loveholidays (2025) - Holidays/travel: Modern building with vacation/travel theme
Use consistent blue directional arrows along the curved path showing the forward journey from stop 1 through stop 7 in order.
Third attempt - Condensed journey
In the style of The Urban Sketcher — loose ink pen outlines with selective watercolor washes, gestural on-location drawing aesthetic — draw my career as a journey from Sony (gaming) to Elastic (enterprise search software) to loveholidays (travel tech)
Final vision - London style refined
Create an isometric aerial view of a career journey through a London city, styled as a Google Maps directions view. The camera looks down from above at a curved path through narrow streets. Include iconic London landmarks in the background (Big Ben, The Shard, Tower Bridge, etc.).
IMPORTANT: The path must flow in strict chronological order following these stops in sequence:
- VisualDNA (2013)
- Big Data Partnership (2013)
- BenevolentAI (2015)
- Skimlinks (2017)
- PlayStation (2018)
- Elastic (2022)
- loveholidays (2025)
Show only ONE navigation interface panel in the top-left corner listing these stops in order.
Building style instructions:
- Each stop on the journey should have a building that reflects the company’s theme
- Display the company name as a large sign/text ON TOP of each building (like rooftop signage)
- VisualDNA (2013) - Profiling and ads: Modern contemporary building
- Big Data Partnership (2013) - Big data: Old industrial/warehouse style building
- BenevolentAI (2015) - Clinical research: Traditional academic/research institution style
- Skimlinks (2017) - Ads: Transitional modern office building
- PlayStation (2018) - Games: Contemporary entertainment/tech building with gaming aesthetics
- Elastic (2022) - Enterprise search: Modern tech headquarters with sleek design
- loveholidays (2025) - Holidays/travel: Modern building with vacation/travel theme
Path instructions:
- Draw ONE continuous blue path/route that starts at the BOTTOM LEFT and moves CLOCKWISE around the city
- The path should flow: bottom left → top left → top right → bottom right
- Use large, consistent directional arrows pointing forward along this single clockwise path
- NO branching or bifurcation - the path must remain as ONE continuous line throughout
Refinement and Post-processing
The concept went through several generations before landing on the final version.
The first attempt placed Paris streets as the backdrop — atmospheric, but only half-successful.
The buildings picked up the Paris style well. The streets didn’t. They looked generic, not Parisian at all — no winding boulevards, no characteristic geometry, none of the texture that makes Paris feel like Paris.
The second attempt went further with the Paris city brief and came out a lot closer to what I had in mind.
The streets finally felt Parisian. And I liked the Google Maps direction panel in the top-right corner — it added a navigational framing that suited the concept well.
Getting the directional arrows right along the path was its own challenge. The model kept misaligning them or duplicating them in odd places.
But even with the improved result, Paris didn’t quite feel right. I’ve lived in London. That’s where most of this career actually happened. Using a Paris aesthetic felt like choosing the wrong city for the story.
The third attempt condensed the narrative to just three companies to test readability. Fewer stops did make the image cleaner, but it lost the full career arc.
The final London version was a significant step up in specificity. Defining each building’s architectural style per company — warehouse for Big Data, academic institution for BenevolentAI, gaming complex for PlayStation — gave the model enough context to produce a meaningfully varied cityscape.
London landmarks in the background — Big Ben, The Shard, Tower Bridge — grounded the image in the right place.