36 new places, and stamps that look like the place

This weekend FOMO Sun grew from 387 to 423 places, and every stamp was redrawn. Here is why, and how we chose.

Blind spots on the map

FOMO Sun can only send you where it knows the weather. So we drew a map of every place in the catalog and marked each area more than 14 km from the nearest one. Inside Switzerland, 194 squares lit up. Some were obvious, like the whole Goms, Disentis and the Valle di Blenio. Some were embarrassing: the Rhine Falls were missing.

We added only places worth the trip, never a dot for the sake of a dot:

• North and Jura: the Rhine Falls, Arenenberg on the Untersee, Arbon, Saint-Ursanne.
• West: Geneva (its own bise-and-fog weather), Romont on its hill, the Lüderenalp above the Emmental fog.
• Central Alps: Disentis, Münster in the Goms, the Valle di Blenio, San Bernardino.
• Graubünden: Zernez and the National Park, Müstair, Soglio.

The empty squares inside Switzerland dropped from 194 to 84. What is left is mostly high mountains with nothing to visit.

The outer ring

Then we drew the same map for the neighbours, up to about 280 km out, and looked for areas more than 50 km from any place. The biggest gap was a surprise: the whole Ligurian coast. On a grey day north of the Alps, the Mediterranean is often bright, so Genoa and Camogli are in now.

• France: Besançon, Baume-les-Messieurs, Nancy, Bourg-Saint-Maurice, Langres, Plombières-les-Bains, Wissembourg, Briançon.
• Italy: the Langhe, the Sacra di San Michele, Oropa, Lake Iseo, Madonna di Campiglio, Genoa, Camogli, Bobbio.
• Austria and Germany: Längenfeld in the Ötztal, Tübingen, Hohenzollern Castle, Bad Urach, Andechs.

We left the Po plain out on purpose. It is flat, and on winter days it is one of the foggiest places in Europe. Nothing in the circle is more than 70 km from a place now.

Stamps that look like the place

Every place has a vintage travel stamp. The old ones were drawn by an image model in one go, lettering included, and it showed: typos, swapped names, flags drawn wrong, a Matterhorn behind places that have no Matterhorn.

The new stamps split the job. The model only paints a picture, with no text and no flag, in one 1960s and 70s poster style. The lettering is set from our data, in one typeface, by a small script. Then we checked the pictures against the real places, close up: the Grossmünster in Zurich has domed towers, not spires; Basel’s Münster is red sandstone; the Aletsch Glacier has no huts on it. Dozens were redrawn until they matched.

Trains, abroad too

New places need train times. For places in Germany, Austria and Italy we used a free planner that went down this weekend, so FOMO Sun now also asks Transitous, an open, community-run journey planner for all of Europe. It plans from map coordinates, so even the small stops it never had an ID for get real train times.

Have a look on the map or browse all places. And if your favourite sunny spot is still missing, tell us.