These days, every Friday night my family piles in front of the tv and we watch WandaVision. The weirdest show we’ve ever seen. And it just keeps getting cooler. And cooler. Most of the fun is in trying to decipher all the encoded clues and just nerd out with YouTubers who comb through each episode … Continue reading Turn Your Neighborhood into a Cinematic Command Center Hexagon Map…Because.
Light is an amazing thing. Is it a particle? Is it a wave? It’s both?? How do we sense light with our eyes and minds and how do we represent light via a contraption like a monitor? And so on. We can only see a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum; biologically we are effectively … Continue reading Bending Llight & Blending Light
I made this map for colleague, Bojan Šavrič, who is Slovenian. But I thought it would be fun to share here, too, because why not? Here is a video showing how to get a perfect neatline without doing any math. And here is how to make that cute little reference globe there in the corner. … Continue reading An Imhof-Inspired Map of Slovenia
Here is a luscious topographic quadrangle of the Adirondacks printed in 1902 (surveyed in 1892!): And here it is with some hillshading blended into it… What’s going on here?! This is one of those things where you take an achingly beautiful vintage topo or geology map and then brew some modern 3D hillshade into it to make … Continue reading How to Make one of those Cool 3D Vintage Topo Maps in ArcGIS Pro
Well, 2020 looks to be winding down, if you can believe it. Thank goodness for the indomitable clockworks of celestial bodies, am I right? Lots has happened this year…as you may well be aware, but among the bizarreness I do take some joy and find satisfaction in making and sharing map how-to videos. I’m rather … Continue reading Mappy How-To Videos of 2020
It’s that time of year (as it was last year and the year before) when geographers cozy up to zoom chats with spatially-minded friends, replete with our finest topographically-themed virtual backgrounds, our Lego assemblages meticulously arranged within view, and only our most coveted geography tomes visible on the bookshelf (plus a handful outsider works like the Farside Gallery or knitting … Continue reading Make this Cassini Globe Ornament Please
Remember when you were a mid-century master of terrain mapping? When you imagined the play of light on a topographic surface and sketched in shadows with your graphite stick and layered your photographic plates to generate one renowned cartographic wonder after another by day, then dabbled in paints and washes exploring the luxurious interplay of colors … Continue reading Imhof-ish Cartography: Everywhere Can Look Like Switzerland
If you are going to add a scalebar (or anything) to you map, you might as well own it, right? In this video series I’ll walk through the configuration and design options for scalebars in ArcGIS Pro. I have to admit, I rarely use scalebars (for several reasons, including laziness, frequent use of non-equidistant projections, … Continue reading Making a digital version of a full-on vintage scalebar
This November 18, at 1:00 pm eastern, Keith VanGraafeiland and I will be conversing with six mega-interesting map friends. You can sign up here to join us. I mean, why not? GIS Day (stands for Geographic-information-systems Is Spectacular…Day) is a day to celebrate the wonder and knowable mystery of spatial thinking and geographic action. Keith … Continue reading GIS Day—Low Budget High Fidelity
The other day the Library of Congress Map Division’s rather inspiring twitter account shared this lovely map illustrating the full 360° view of the White Mountains from the peak of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington. I stared at it a bit—initially to sort out what the deuce it was that I was looking at—and then with … Continue reading Rotating an old atlas page, as it ought to be rotated.
