Adventures In Mapping | John Nelson Maps

Here is a map of the Shetland Islands, customized (YouTube link) from this map of Indonesia. Continue reading Shetland

Here is a map of the area around Indonesia. It sports a pretty dramatic vignette, a sculpted terrain, rippley water lines, a paper texture, and that crazy glassy overview map. For your carto-adventure edification, I’ve made a two-part video series showing how to make it. I’ll also list the steps beneath each video if you … Continue reading How to Make this Map of Indonesia

In the hyper-technical world of cartography one must often endure a no-holds-barred review session where a map is scrutinized against a time-tested checklist of must-haves. Title? Check.Scalebar? Check.Legend? Check.North arrow? Check. Only then is it an acceptable spatial document worthy of the masses… …except not really. A really great map can have any, or none, … Continue reading Put a North Arrow On It?

This is a presentation I recorded for the glorious North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). It’s my favorite carto conference and just jam packed with fascinating folks diving into the fun of map making. In this one, I get into the why and how of YouTube map-making videos. Plus I got to co-present with one … Continue reading Map-Making on YouTube? Cautionary tales, Context, and Encouragement

By golly, it sure was nice chatting with Steven Feldman for the Geomob podcast about the thin veil between art and cartography, stealing opportunities for accidental professional development, and brewing fun into the map-making process. I think I could have continued chatting with Steven well into his evening but he wisely capped it at a … Continue reading Geomob Podcast with Steven Feldman

Just because your map is in the Netherlands, doesn’t mean you can’t brew some terrain hillshade into it! I’m from the glacially-scraped flatlands of Michigan, trust me, I know flat. But I also know that a bit (or a lot) of terrain hillshade on a map can bring it to life. So what can be … Continue reading How to Force Terrain for Maps of Very Flat Areas

This is an 8 foot (aka 2.4 meters or 244 centimeters…why doesn’t anyone use decimeters? decimeters are underused) diameter globe that glows and slowly spins in a building on the campus of Esri. If you want to learn about it’s ideation, creation, inflation, and installation, check out this conflagration of information. Celestial When I was a … Continue reading Big globe, Small World

Perhaps as important as fire to the USA Wildfires map, created by Jinnan Zhang and me, is the smoke forecast layer. Fire is a punctuated risk, but the resulting smoke is a far-flung and pervasive risk. The National Weather Service smoke forecast layer is a helpful resource for understanding the current, and projected, concentrations of airborne particulates. Recent improvements … Continue reading Smoke Forecast Timeline added to the USA Wildfires Map

Here is a map of the Great Rift Valley, in Ethiopia. It is very much a 2D map. Sort of. Absolutely. In a sense. It uses the Plan Oblique tool, available in the glorious set of Terrain Tools for ArcGIS Pro, released by Ken Field some time back. Developed by Bernie Jenny and Bojan Šavrič, based on some beautiful hand-wrought oblique … Continue reading How to Make this Map of the Rift Valley

This is the audio from a podcast interview where I got to chat with MiCAMP’s Michael Cousins and Nathan Fazer. We talk about school and work and motivation and creativity and the ups and downs of it all. It was fun chatting with these fellow Michiganders. It’s over an hour long so if I see … Continue reading Podcast Interview with MiCAMP’s Michael Cousins and Nathan Fazer