Remember when you were a mid-century master of terrain mapping? When you imagined the play of light on a topographic surface and sketched in shadows with your graphite stick and layered your photographic plates to generate one renowned cartographic wonder after another by day, then dabbled in paints and washes exploring the luxurious interplay of colors … Continue reading Imhof-ish Cartography: Everywhere Can Look Like Switzerland
If you are going to add a scalebar (or anything) to you map, you might as well own it, right? In this video series I’ll walk through the configuration and design options for scalebars in ArcGIS Pro. I have to admit, I rarely use scalebars (for several reasons, including laziness, frequent use of non-equidistant projections, … Continue reading Making a digital version of a full-on vintage scalebar
This November 18, at 1:00 pm eastern, Keith VanGraafeiland and I will be conversing with six mega-interesting map friends. You can sign up here to join us. I mean, why not? GIS Day (stands for Geographic-information-systems Is Spectacular…Day) is a day to celebrate the wonder and knowable mystery of spatial thinking and geographic action. Keith … Continue reading GIS Day—Low Budget High Fidelity
The other day the Library of Congress Map Division’s rather inspiring twitter account shared this lovely map illustrating the full 360° view of the White Mountains from the peak of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington. I stared at it a bit—initially to sort out what the deuce it was that I was looking at—and then with … Continue reading Rotating an old atlas page, as it ought to be rotated.
I really enjoyed my chat with Daniel O’Donohue for his MapScaping podcast. We spoke mostly about the nature of simplicity in design and communication and the tone of mapping in social media. Continue reading The MapScaping Podcast
I chatted with Jennifer Horowitz for the Harvard on the Map radio program about my background and work, and a time when I was in a rut. Continue reading Harvard on the Map
Here is a map looking at a century of California wildfires, sliced into 100-square-mile zones. Here are some close-up extracts. The data comes from the Fire and Resource Assessment Program (acronymed to…FRAP) accessed from Living Atlas. This is an update to the previous version where I made a topological error (intersection rather than within when … Continue reading 100 Years of Wildfires
Here is an ArcGIS Pro style containing four north arrows. They have a glassy semitransparent white appearance with a shadow effect for better visibility over highly textured surfaces while muted enough to provide balance. They provide a visual reference for north that doesn’t fully obscure or otherwise steal visibility from underlying map imagery. Plus they’re … Continue reading Glassy North Arrows
CovidPulse is an interactive map that shows Unite States coronavirus trends at the local level, since February, updated daily. 0:14 Johns Hopkins University U.S. County data source0:40 What is a sparkline?1:38 Information architecture influenced by “Designing for the Scent of Information” by Jared Spool.2:25 Trend status coloration by Charlie Frye.2:45 Outlier counties with large prison populations. The unexpected questions … Continue reading CovidPulse
Here’s a map I made in 2003, for fun, when I was a student at Central Michigan University. I spent many an hour tinkering on it in the geography department’s computer lab, playing with Flash symbols, movie clips, and re-purposed ActionScript. As a new map maker the capabilities that Flash provided were vast and thrilling. … Continue reading Random Blast from the Past with this Old Flash Map! pt1
