Adventures In Mapping

In February of 2001, Danielle and I were driving through the chain of bridges connecting the Florida Key islands, tossing around possible baby names for our unborn boy. Danielle was thumbing through a fat book of baby name ideas; I’d asked her to read through some of the nordic names. She hit upon Bjorn, and … Continue reading Bear Island

Here is a step-by-step if you are interested in how the felt is made (here’s the whole map-making-madness channel, if you are feeling brave). It covers the creation of a texture in Adobe Illustrator, using that texture image in Pro symbology, then saving and using a saved style. Also, you get to hear my nasally Midwestern … Continue reading How to Make the Felt Style

Originally posted at the Esri Viewpoint blog, here. Each year my siblings and our families gather at my father’s home in Mackinaw City, Michigan and spend the better part of a week procrastinating the inevitable forced structure of the annual family photograph. Pausing the beautiful chaos of the gathering for the brief formality of cramming … Continue reading Thinking about the Earth at Night

These maps were tediously cut, stacked, and stitched by hand. Took me forever but it was worth it. Also, I am lying these are digital maps. Here is an ArcGIS Pro resource to get cracking away at felting your own maps. And I do some pondering at the end of this blog post about why … Continue reading Felted Cartography

The freezing of Arctic and Antarctic waters is a seasonal pulse of our planet. The maps below show ice extents, per month, since 1979. This map shows 40 years of sea ice extents, color-coded by month . It’s interesting to see the oscillation between the opposite seasons of the North and South Poles. As the … Continue reading Historic Sea Ice Extents

Well shoot, I was just digging around my folders for something else and discovered this hillshade amplified map of a portion of the Grand Canyon that I did a couple years ago and forgot about. Anyway, I thought it was kind of neat so here it is, somewhat unforgotten… Happy Mapping! John Continue reading Random Map of the Grand Canyon

Are are some snapshots of a method using a handful of offset hillshade angles, each with a neighboring color wheel color. The result is a chromatic optical sense of surface elevation. Slightly different than a flattened single-band multidirectional method and way different than an aspect map. If you are interested in how do to it … Continue reading Throwing Shade: Gallery