Author: John

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

Sometimes I’ll spend a fair amount of time getting a map just right. Then a little cartographic muse whispers into my ear…how would a dark version of this map look? Do I have to start over replacing all the symbology to a dark (or light) version? Not necessarily. Here is a lovely plate of birds, accessed from the Boston … Continue reading Create a Light or Dark Version of Any Map in Two Seconds

Ah those 80s movies that made us squirm with the real threat of automation run amok but then heave a sigh of relief when the kid teaches the computer that the only way to win a global thermonuclear exchange is to not get into one. Those war rooms are always the best. Dark places with … Continue reading How to Make an 80s War Room Map

Often I find the best way of understanding something is to try to imagine its opposite. There’s probably a word for that in the field of rhetoric, but I don’t know what it is. So I’ll just imagine that I do. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been asked by two different folks about … Continue reading Flipping the World Inside Out, with Guest Cartographer Sparrow

Hello! Here is a hillshaded terrain map of Costa Rica. I’ve never been there, but I’d like to see it someday. Click this image if you’d like to save it as a full-sized jpeg (10MB)… If you are feeling dangerous, here’s a GeoTIFF file (97MB) that you can add to your map project. And if … Continue reading The Terrain of Costa Rica

A while back my family went to see the animated film, Raya and the Last Dragon. It got mixed reviews from the Nelsons but what really caught my eye was the illustrative cartographic scene used to introduce the back story. It used a charming paper puppet theater aesthetic; the wavy water patterns were especially beautiful. When you are … Continue reading Make Waves

Here is a diorama micro-world sort of thing of the Delmarva Peninsula. It was made for the Delmarva GIS Conference. It’s the dimensions of your monitor, if you wanted to use it as a desktop image. If you are curious about how to make something like this, there are a couple YouTube videos available here … Continue reading A Delmarva Peninsula Micro World

There is something meditative and wonderful about seeing…and making…hillshades. A nice hillshade can turn a map from something…not hillshaded…to something dripping with tactile charm. And there are all sorts of tones and techniques out there, each with a bit of a different feel. Here’s a playlist of 38 (and counting) videos showing different ways to make, use, … Continue reading Fun Ambient Hillshade