Esri released their ArcGIS StoryMaps Frames app into beta in November 2025, a “mobile-first short-form storytelling format for ArcGIS StoryMaps.” If you couldn’t tell from my portfolio already—I’m a fan of StoryMaps—and so I made this project as a way to get familiar with the new app. I share most of my personal work on social media and I’m assuming most people likely interact with it on mobile devices, so the option to have a format optimized for small, portrait-oriented screens was compelling.
This bite-sized story offers a brief tour of famous whirlpools (maelstroms) around the world. When people think of whirlpools, they probably picture the big, fictional, ship-eating kind found in books and film—but whirlpools exist in the real world, too. Albeit, they are much more demure (to use Dictionary.com’s 2024 Word of the Year, two years too late). Some of those fictional whirlpools have real-world counterparts highlighted here.
I also wanted to try out a map with animated icons, and the ones in this project were drawn frame-by-frame and animated within the Procreate app on iPad (exported as simple GIFs). I drew the map “monsters” and animated the cover image in that app, as well. The basemap is the Watercolor basemap from the ArcGIS Living Atlas, with some additional effects applied within the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer to desaturate it and push it into the background more. I also added an additional white landmass layer and applied the ‘soft light’ blend mode, to help add contrast between the land and sea—as the original basemap had some weak contrast between the two at larger scales.