Author: John

As a follow-up to this experiment, I’ve tried it out on a global retro shaded relief plate beautifully hand-painted by Kenneth Townsend, so it could be tiled up as a basemap at large scales (the zoomed-out ones). You can play with it here. And see how it was made here. Continue reading Vintage Shaded Relief Basemap

Here is a layering of hillshade hand-painted by Herwig G. Schutzler in 1965 with NASA imagery. How is it that I’ve gone this long without playing with the beautiful vintage hand-painted shaded relief of yesteryear’s cartographers, generously made available by Tom Patterson? Inspired by a tweet from Greg Fiske, I decided it was time to … Continue reading Smashing Vintage Hillshade with Imagery

Here is a map showing 40 years (and 8,000 incidents) of nautical piracy. Data with heavily overlapping points, like this, can obscure areas of ultra high-frequency, looking no different from moderate clusters of activity. Aggregation can be a good viz option, and it also provides little cells within which you can create statistical summaries (which … Continue reading 40 Years of Nautical Piracy

I had the distinct privilege (and what I would later recognize as great fortune) to work closely with Rupert for my first year or so at Esri, as we collaborated on what would become the Cascade StoryMap template. I only mention Cascade specifically here because Rupert would chide me if I didn’t. To be a … Continue reading My Friend Rupert Essinger

Here are all the tracked (satellites and stuff) icebergs since the year 2000. I was interested to see a consistent Coriolis swirl around the Antarctic continent, and then a general flinging from the Antarctic Peninsula like a jai alai cesta. 17 years is sort of a long time to mentally track with a moving cycle. … Continue reading Iceberg Motion

These are the top five most plastic-polluting rivers in the world. Each day they emit the amount of plastic equivalent to those stacks of elephants. Recently I made a retro-styled comparative graphic of the top three plastic-polluting rivers in the wold, based on an article in Nature. I regretted my rather arbitrary use of a … Continue reading Top 5 Rivers of Plastic

This is the Grand Canyon flipped inside out. Some of my earliest memories of the place had to do with the trippy feeling of my eyes and mind trying to make sense of the scale. I had seen many mountain ranges and vistas, including some on the way, but the vast negative space played havoc … Continue reading Inverted Grand Canyon