This morning I saw the achingly beautiful set of “Black Marble” images of the Earth at night. Joshua Stevens, of NASA’s Visible Earth team, presented some fascinating comparative images of how some places have changed since the last comprehensive mapping of the Earth at Night, which was 2012. When looking at them, I thought it … Continue reading Old Lights and New Lights
Maybe you saw this ridiculous post, describing some fun, very manual, steps to make your maps look like they were assembled of 1×1 bricks on the wonderful vibrant Utopian plain that is a lego base plate. Vanni Zhang rightly saw a better way than all that manual tinkering, and assembled a robot to do the lego construction … Continue reading Lego-ifier
What we choose to watch on TV says a lot about who we are and what we’re into. Of course viewing preferences between different sports will have a strong regional pattern, but what about the more subtle difference of preferring the collegiate level or the professional level within the same sport? That’s pretty interesting, too! … Continue reading Bubble Madness
Daniel Huffman and I are asking map makers to share with their/our peers stories of a time when creating a map stirred something within them. It’s called A Cartographer’s Story. This is the invitation: Every act of creation is personal. Behind the cartographic theory, tools, and techniques, there is a human being who struggles, who … Continue reading A Cartographer’s Story
This is a map showing the beer vs wine preference across American counties. The brightness is based on how much we spend on beer and wine. Visit this story map to walk through the process and rationale leading up to this value-by-alpha map, if you dare! After sharing this map, a fellow map nerd helpfully pointed … Continue reading Beer vs Wine
This is a cross-post with the ArcGIS Blog You can wield the mighty mighty powers of the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) to create all sorts of practical, and impractical, or just fun, topographic effects. Why? Making interesting looking maps is awesome and we cartographers don’t always feel terribly practical. But that’s where some sort of … Continue reading Hacking a DEM Sunrise
Here is a look at the per-capita distribution of various top fast food franchises in the United States. The bubbles show the geographic trend of relative popularity across the country -each brand is brimming with interesting trends both in where they are popular and where they are conspicuously absent. The comparative layout allows for a quick … Continue reading Fast Food Frequency
[Update: Lego-ify maps to your heart’s content here] I really liked the charming simplicity and retro vibes of this set of lego-ified works of art, by Geoffroy Amelot. One of those common instances where I wish I’d thought of it. I especially liked this Lego Vincent. So I tried it out on the same portrait … Continue reading Lego-ified Maps
Here is a look at the ongoing drought that has been hovering over the American Southeast since spring. It shows six months of aggregated drought areas (drought perimeters of varying intensity, released weekly, collected from June – November of 2016), binned up into 100 square mile hexagonal zones. These zones are scaled by the proportion … Continue reading Six Months of Drought in the American Southeast
There are lots of really complex ways of blending calculated hillshade onto aerial imagery. But there’s also a really simple way! With the addition of transparency support in thematic color gradients in Pro, you can whip up a bit of magic and make beautiful imagery pop off the screen a bit, without the bummer of … Continue reading Terrain-Augmented Imagery
