Kober Kümmerly Frey Media
| Kober-Kümmerly + Frey Media AG | |
|---|---|
| Publishing management | Tim Kober (board member) |
| Supervisory board |
|
| Share capital | 300,000 euros |
| sales | approx. 1.5 million euros per year |
| Employee | 10 (status 11/2005) |
| commercial register | Cologne HRB 55531 |
The Kober Kümmerly + Frey Media AG is a German cartographic publisher based in Cologne .
history
It was founded in 1999 as a joint subsidiary of the German Kober-Verlag GmbH (founded in 1982 , Düsseldorf ) and the Swiss card publisher Kümmerly + Frey AG (founded in 1852 , Bern ).
Kober-Verlag has been the sole shareholder since 2002 .
In 1983 Kober produced a comic series called Yeti, which was discontinued after one issue.
In 2011, the development of digital maps sold online began, which have their origins in OpenStreetMap data and are designed in a customer-oriented manner. Sales started in December 2014 via the Internet address www.mapz.com.
Products and competition
Kober-Kümmerly + Frey is a publisher for custom-made cartographic products. In addition to classic print productions for the marketing needs of companies, the publisher concentrates on card design and the granting of usage rights to third parties. Selected cartographies from the publisher are also available in stores under the name of branded article providers.
Via an online service, the publisher offers the option of downloading map sections optimized for printing and online display for private and commercial use onto your own computer.
Download portal
Under the domain mapz.com, Kober-Kümmerly + Frey offers the cartography range for both private customers and companies to download . In addition to the editable EPS format , the data can be downloaded to your own computer in up to 400 dpi as a JPG or PNG file for further processing.
The use of all maps offered on mapz.com is free of charge for non-commercial purposes. For Kober-Kümmerly + Frey, non-commercial use means, for example, purely private use - but also non-profit associations and organizations, NGOs and educational institutions such as kindergartens , schools and universities can download the maps free of charge and use them as they wish.
As part of news reporting, it can be used in any media genre online and offline free of charge.
For Wikipedia articles, the publisher grants the necessary approval / permission on request. The background for the necessity of the release is the comprehensive right of use, which is assigned by the publisher to Wikipedia and its users with a release and must therefore be decided in each individual case. As a rule, however, a release under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license can always be assumed.
For the use of the cards in companies, there are simple license models for individual downloads and flat rates for customers with regular needs.
Cartographic method
When Kümmerly + Frey was founded, in the middle of the 19th century , it was common practice to use ink drawings to make map designs . Editions were created by means of copper engraving in gravure printing and the prints were manually colored with watercolors . These handcrafted unique items were time-consuming, but could already meet the criteria for a highly appealing, aesthetic card with the means available at the time.
Over time, the changed printing method : About the lithography , the pressure by means of Solnhofen limestone slabs in the 20th century , it came in the 1950s to the individual map elements color isolated on a plurality of transparent films to draw with ink or engrave what a more flexible representation made possible. These foils (so-called originals), which each contained the map elements of a color or shade , were copied over by means of reprotechnical , photochemical processes, rasterized and merged into individual reversed foils, one for each printing color. This procedure was lengthy and costly.
With the availability of the first really powerful Apple Macintosh computers, Kober-Verlag began converting analogue cartography to digital technology in 1994. Ink drawings are a thing of the past and have been replaced by illustration programs such as Adobe Illustrator . The output took place as a color separation directly on film material suitable for the printing plates .
Twenty years later, in 2014, the graphic modifications to the map series are still being implemented on Apple Macintosh systems. However, drawing technology has changed fundamentally compared to the 1990s. All basic data are now graphically prepared and made available interactively on the basis of the technological platform from mapz.com and the data from the OpenStreetMap project on powerful Unix servers. After many years of development work by Kober-Kümmerly + Frey, the aesthetics of this computer-generated cartography now approach the old, hand-drawn map series and sometimes even surpass them.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ For collectors: Comic series A4 softcover 1983: Yeti
- ↑ Your Maps . In: Page , issue 08/2015, pp. 78–82