We just moved into a new apartment and have more space than we did in our old place, so I’ve been looking for fun wall art to fill the extra wall space. While wandering around World Market the other day, I came across a set of framed prints for cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago that were made to look like elements from a periodic table (or as they put it in the description, “the opening titles of a drama series about a chemistry teacher gone ‘bad'”). I thought it might be fun to do a series with all the places Nick and I have lived, and to add some color, decided to use photos from each place as the backdrop with the text over them in white.

I put the area code in the top left and the GPS coordinates on the bottom the way the World Market version had them, but added the years we lived in each place to the upper right corner. Once I had the template created in Adobe Illustrator, it was just a matter of switching out the text and image content and saving each one as a JPG file for printing. I ordered 8×10 prints from Costco and picked up eight 8×10 RIBBA frames from IKEA. The frames are nice and deep, and actually would work great sitting on a shelf as well, as shown in the photo below. The best part: the whole project only cost around $45 for 8 framed prints.

For anyone that has access to Illustrator (CC version) and wants to create their own, you can click here to download the AI template I created. Or purchase a print-ready file download from Etsy, either for a city like San Francisco or New York, or through the customized made-to-order option.