Jordan Ma has been a Hayes Valley resident for four years, and he's spent a lot of that time sitting in coffee shops and observing the neighborhood's architecture and local color. One day, Jordan picked up a watercolor book of scenes of San Francisco from the dearly-departed Bibliohead book store. "That kind of inspired me to do my own take on it," he told us.

Jordan, a UX designer for mobile apps by day, had been looking around for a creative side project. Thus inspired, he began work on a visual mini tour of his neighborhood. Called Valley of Hayes, it's a representation of the small details around Hayes Street that caught his eye: "a personal take on a place that I was spending a lot of time in and was feeling like home to me," he said.

"All the little characters that you see on there are people that I've met," he said of the images, each of which take him about two hours to create using Illustrator and Photoshop. "I actually finished it about three months ago, forgot about it, and just recently found it again and thought I should put it up."

Since he set up the website, he says that he's been getting good feedback and people seem to be enjoying it. "The plan is to add a new place every week or two," he said. "This is a project I really enjoy working on."

Though he works in tech, Jordan says he's also working to bring together artistically talented people who've been distracted by their day jobs. "I realized that I had a lot of friends that were pretty good artists and were all doing startup jobs that were overshadowing this artistic potential," he said.

Recently, he and his friends have started Hidden Shapes Society, an arts collective that he hopes will do some art shows this year, in addition to to the Soundcloud mix tapes they've already begun putting together. "We have a lot of ideas," he said. 

A Davis, CA native, Jordan says the Hayes Valley neighborhood is unique. "Each venue has a very unique identity," he said. "It's a very small street but it feels a lot closer and tight-knit than others, so hopefully I was able to capture that with the project."