Adventures In Mapping

Here is a map in the style of Tim Wallace’s definitive map of the 2016 US Presidential Election. Tim’s unique take, and beautiful craftsmanship, show two Americas, one of Trump and one of Clinton. While there is certainly plenty of truth to the polarization of American politics and the keenly-sensed social barriers that these electoral … Continue reading The Blended America of 2016

A couple weeks ago I got sucked in to the amazing, and pretty cartographically intimidating, realm of fantasy mapping over at the Cartographers’ Guild. I wondered about a few tips to get more typically GIS-ish nerds, like me, thinking more artfully about the maps we make. Here are a few hacks that I came up … Continue reading Fantasy Book Illustration Hacks

“Whoa, you write weird.” I was a lab instructor for an intro to Geographic Information Systems class and I was scribbling something or another on the whiteboard. One of the students, and education major, noticed that my letter writing sequences were an abomination and called me out. I had never noticed it. So I proceeded … Continue reading Handedness

  I stumbled on a fun technique the other day that afforded me a quick scale-independent means of adding in hand-drawn landscape features for fantasy-style map-insert things from awesome books. I’ll follow this post up with specifics on how to achieve it, but in the meantime, here is a quick hack for a hand-drawn tolkienish … Continue reading Fantasy Book Illustration Fun

In speaking with some of my fellow map-obsessed, I learned to my chagrin that my Lights On Lights Out map used a color scheme that was pretty much impenetrable to the color deficient. Sorry! It was a good reminder that good visualization should not needlessly alienate up to 10% of the population. Interestingly, I can count … Continue reading Brighter & Dimmer

Here is a woodcut bathymetry map. Why? I don’t know. But here it is. Here’s a version with Greg’s Cable data. Represented as various gauges of cord, or course. Here is a how-to, should you find yourself with nothing left to lose and the creation of a faux wooden map is your last best shot … Continue reading Woodcut Bathymetry Map

As a follow-up to last week’s visualization of Old Light and New Light, I wanted to make a single map, of the whole world, comparing NASA’s new 2016 Earth At Night image to the 2012 version. Using a simple pixel-difference math bot, this map isolates places where lights have come on (or increased) and where … Continue reading Lights On & Lights Out