02 — Public infrastructure — 2025
Tidewater
for Marin Bay Authority
The Authority had eleven years of hydrodynamic modeling that nobody outside the agency could read. We turned it into a public map that a homeowner, a planner and a reporter each get something different out of, without any of them needing a GIS license.
- 74,300
- 410 kB
- AA+
01
The constraint that shaped everything
The Authority asked for a map that works during a flood. That means degraded cell service, a phone at nineteen percent battery, and a user who is frightened. Every subsequent decision fell out of that sentence.
Tiles are pre-baked and cached aggressively. The application shell is a single 410 kilobyte payload with no runtime font fetch. Once a parcel has been viewed, it is available offline indefinitely.
02
Three readers, one map
A homeowner wants one number: does water reach my address, and in what year. A planner wants the scenario matrix. A reporter wants a defensible citation. Rather than three products, Tidewater has one map with three depths of disclosure, and the deeper layers are genuinely optional.
Uncertainty is drawn as texture rather than color, which survives both grayscale printing and the eight percent of the audience with a color vision deficiency.
“We were asked for a visualization. What the agency actually needed was a way to be trusted in public.”
Halyard
A keyboard-first booking terminal that beat the phone call.