Doodled as a huge thank you to WordPress for featuring a recent post on “Freshly Pressed”

The University of Victoria campus and its amazingly circular Ring Road provided the canvas for my GPS doodle of the WordPress logo – a show of gratitude for featuring one of my posts on Freshly Pressed

The exciting news came across my Twitter feed as I was winding down after my Saturday morning bike ride.

My July 9 post – “Six months. Two wheels. 50 GPS doodles.” – had been Freshly Pressed.

As WordPress explains, “Every day, we feature a few editors’ picks on the Freshly Pressed section of WordPress.com. Freshly Pressed posts can be about anything — and published today or years ago — but they all have a few things in common: they enlighten us, inspire us, entertain us, and get us talking.”

As a show of gratitude, I decided to doodle the WordPress logo.

The WordPress logo is a stylized W enclosed in a perfect circle. And as the only perfect circle on the Victoria map is University of Victoria’s 1.9-kilometre Ring Road, I knew right away what my canvas would be.

At a mere 0.3 km², this was far and away my smallest canvas to date. (For most of my GPS doodles, my canvas is at least 10 km² and as large as 60 km² (for my Siren of the Salish Sea).

As I learned early on, a large canvas is far more ‘forgiving’ than a small one. If you stray slightly off course, overshoot a turn or miscalculate a maneuver, you may not even notice it in the finished picture. But on a small scale, precision is everything.

For my doodle of the WordPress logo, I had to rely almost entirely on my ‘connecting the dots’ technique. (Stopping my Garmin at point A and restarting it at point B creates a straight line that connects the dots.) I overlaid the WordPress logo on a satellite view of the UVic campus and plotted key points along the outline of the W; and as I pedalled around campus, I used my iPhone map app to zero in on the points I had plotted.

My first attempt at the WordPress logo (inset image #3) highlights the importance of precision on a small canvas. Adjusting some of the STOP/START points by just a few metres for version 2 made a monumental difference.

Total distance cycled to create my GPS doodle of the WordPress logo (including my failed version 1) was 29.8 km (18.5 mi).

See it on Strava

Note: The GPS points will render correctly only if you are logged in at Strava.com