I once heard someone say that standard hillshade (one-direction light source) ignores half of the terrain. While this is an exaggeration, it makes a good point. Earth has an atmosphere and light diffuses, bounces, and wraps around a terrain in a manner that a single light direction misses. What’s more, the hues of light behave … Continue reading Throwing Shade In Wild Color
Cartographers will often exaggerate the natural scale of a mapped feature to help it communicate something of its nature. Some examples are vertical exaggeration of terrain or the very existence of point symbols (cities aren’t actually that big). We embellish for effect. Making a river a bit wider at its mouth, where it meets the … Continue reading How to make tapered rivers in ArcGIS Pro
ArcGIS Pro is a serious tool for serious GIS analysis. Are you ready for some seriously charming illustration style cartography? Ok! . . Children’s maps are a valuable thing. They are often the first impressions the world of geography has on every single one of us. What an opportunity! These maps use a handful of tricks and … Continue reading Storybook Cartography
There are lots of reasons to cloak your terrain in a fluffy ephemeral layer of mist. It gives an overall sense of the slope and elevation trends in your view, it showcases meandering river valleys in a charming realism, hilltops peak through with clarity and drama…and it just provides a strange emotional buzz. Clarity through … Continue reading How to add mist to terrain in ArcGIS Online
The one where I chat with Rene Rubalcava about the importance of unstructured data-play, the risk of metrics becoming the goal, where to find inspiration, brewing chaos into professional development, and loving our neighbors! Continue reading The Bounding Box Podcast
I got to join The Geoholics podcast this week and had a fun conversation with Kent Groh, Ryan Kelly, and Nik Smilovsky Here is a link to the episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0sHBwsGyfAoZE3ra5RaeVB?si=f1f3bdf9ab3b4695 Here’s the episode’s description: Raised by two Geography teachers, it goes without saying that this weeks guest has map making in his blood! The guys … Continue reading The Geoholics Podcast
The act of extracting a cube of the earth, seeing its mass and structure laid bare, removed from its global construct…is just, like, trippy. Here’s a fish tank-like view of the glorious Straits of Mackinac. Here’s one of the Grampian Mountains of Scotland. I love Scotland. Here’s a look at the Delmarva peninsula, nestled between … Continue reading How to make this 3D diorama of the Straits of Mackinac
When I was making the absurdly long Appalachian Trail journal map, I soon found that a conventional scalebar just wasn’t going to do the trick. Do I put one at the top, and it’s almost immediately hidden when the map reader unfurls the map a bit? At the bottom where you can’t even see it … Continue reading A Pervasive and Inescapable Scale Reference Technique
In this episode of The Map Hackers, I was honored to be invited to chat about data visualization. And stuff. Hope you enjoy! Here are some related links… Edward Tufte Per capita Olympic medals, over time (when not to map) UN Happiness report map showing six values concurrently Aggregating lots of data into hexagons Not … Continue reading A Conversation about Data Visualization and Stuff
Often polygons don’t play nice and just spill all over neighboring polygons and it can be hard to visually discern the actual extents of the hodgepodge. Sometimes its a problem of just two polygons that overlap, and sometimes you are dealing with loads of overlapping polygons. Here are a handful strategies for representing overlapping polygons … Continue reading Visual Strategies for Overlapping Polygons
Adventures In Mapping 