Why draw Perth like a strategy game?
Because a city is easier to understand when you can see it whole. Pixel Perth takes the building footprints that Perth's OpenStreetMap volunteers have traced, raises each one to its recorded number of storeys, and renders the lot as one continuous isometric scene: no satellite tiles, no stock icons, just the shape of the city and the businesses inside it, in the buildings they really occupy.
What is drawn
Where the map starts and stops
Perth is a long, thin city, and most of its 30-odd councils are quiet streets of single-storey houses. Drawing all of that in isometric would give you a sea of identical boxes, so the map is built around where the buildings and shopfronts crowd together instead: the CBD and East Perth along the river, Northbridge, West Perth and the Kings Park edge, Subiaco and Leederville, Mount Lawley and Highgate along Beaufort Street, Victoria Park's Albany Highway strip, Burswood and the stadium, and South Perth and Como across the water. The boundary is a choice, not a council line, and it grows as the data justifies it.
Every fact has a source
Nothing on the map is invented. Each card says where its details came from and when they were last refreshed; owners can correct their own listing, and corrections to the underlying map go back to the open datasets rather than staying here.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. State datasets are used under their published Creative Commons terms and credited on the pages that use them.
How the drawing works
The engine is written from scratch for this purpose — a canvas renderer with no mapping library behind it. Each suburb is exported as a chunk of tiles; buildings keep their real outlines and are extruded storey by storey, roofs follow the shape tagged in OpenStreetMap, and the painter's order is worked out by height so the towers along the Terrace hide what stands behind them. A building with twenty tenants shows a ×20 badge, and one click opens the whole building. After sunset in Perth the map switches to its night palette on its own.
Who makes it
Pixel Perth is made by Grigory Frolov, a web developer and digital marketer who has spent twenty years building things for the browser and writes about the city on the blog from the map's point of view. There are no adverts, no trackers and no paid placements; verified owners rank first because they have confirmed their details, not because they paid. Ideas, corrections or a story worth telling? Get in touch.
Own a shop, cafe or practice in Perth?
Look for it on the map — it is probably already there. Claiming is free: we send a link to the email address your business already publishes, or you drop a small badge on your own website to prove it is yours. Verified owners get the green tick, a photo gallery, opening hours, links and first place in every list they appear in.
Claim your business — freeSomething not right?
Every listing carries a “Spotted an error?” link. Reports go to a person, not a queue, and the fix is made where the data lives so every map that uses it improves. For anything else, send a message.