The Google Maps of the Week

This week's 'Google Maps of the Week' celebrates the marriage of design and functionality, featuring two maps that manage to look both gorgeous and, at the same time, provide navigation tools that greatly enhance the user experience. 


 Epungo is a beautifully designed and realised Brazilian real-estate map.

The map includes radial and polygon search tools that allow the user to closely define the area in which they wish to search for properties. The search results can also be refined by using the slide controls to define the price, number of rooms and the floor area.

None of these features are exactly new to real-estate maps but Epungo has brought them together in one gorgeous package. To aid usability there is also a step-by-step walk-through of the search tools when you first load the map. 


Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk was one of the six winners of the inaugural Data Journalism Awards.

Pedestrian Crashes in Novosibirsk uses the Google Maps API to map and analyse pedestrian road accidents in Novosibirsk, Russia in 2011. The slide control above the map can be used to filter the results shown by month.

'Pullout stories' in the map sidebar allow the user to explore the data by the gender of the driver, the gender of the pedestrian, the age of driver and pedestrian, and to show only those accidents that caused a fatality.