Adventures In Mapping

Here are some more lego maps from the Brickifier app. Because Lego. And maps. But then I stitched some scenes together pretty quickly, like when I’d join up those sweet green Lego base plates. They are best appreciated in a larger size (since scaling them down just makes them look like low-res imagery and the … Continue reading Lego Maps

Here are 5 tips I wrote for designers to consider while collaborating with developers. Here are 5 tips my code-slinging counterpart, Rene Rubalcava, wrote for developers to consider while they collaborate with designers. In this way the universe is in balance. Continue reading Designers and Developers

So the other day I saw this delightful teaser tweet about an upcoming Lord of the Rings series on Amazon Prime. It’s a beaut. Clearly a take-off from the Christopher Tolkien illustrated map in the sleeves of hardcover LOTR books (including my well-worn set), but with a bit more details in the features. And because … Continue reading Tattered Map Sandwich

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