I’ve been setting parameters for digital hillshade for years. And loving it. But when I got a close look at an actual graphite-on-paper sheet of hillshade from an unknown cartographer of the past I felt…jealous. This was the remarkable work of a master. And it was laid down with their mind and hand. The ideas … Continue reading Hillshade by Hand
I am prone to make digital maps that try to look like they are assembled from actual materials other than pixels and protocols. It’s because I like physical, tactile, maps. They are real in a way that digital maps aren’t. So I tried my hand at drawing a map for the first time since like, … Continue reading Map Made By Hand
To continue my apparent Great Lakes phase, I’ve made a map that looks like it was assembled from a stack of punch-cut cardstock paper layers to replicate lake bathymetry, like these eye-watering delights. Here is a how-to post if you are curious about the process or would like to download the source project, the data, … Continue reading Papercut Lake Map
Amazingly, an ancient remote sensing satellite has been recovered, encased in permafrost, during an archaeological dig in a still-undisclosed location. The 10-20 thousand year old imaging technology was reverse-engineered and scientists have been able to extract the imagery from the device. Among the imagery they found this shot of what is now the Great Lakes … Continue reading Great Glacial Lakes
Here is the result of a late afternoon diversion. The bathymetric data comes from the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. The aspect ratio is consistent with a 1920×1080 monitor so it might make an alright desktop image, if you are into that sort of thing. Quick process run-down, which will take as long to type … Continue reading Great Lakes Bathymetry
Well, coasts have always been especially interesting things on atlases and globes. Here are two throwback methods for giving coastal areas a bit of offset contrast and a sense of depth and abrupt texture. Coastal stippling helps land features rise off the map a bit, via a denser occurrence of pen-tip ink deposits near coasts, … Continue reading Hand-Drawn-ish Coastal Effects
Here are a few maps showing the boundaries of tectonic plates, specifically those around the Pacific Ring of Fire, helpfully traced out by 100+ years of earthquakes. I think about emergence sort of a lot, and this is convenient, because map making with big-ish data often results in blowing the dust off a larger-order system. … Continue reading Earthquakes and Emergence
Occasionally, you might want to give a map label a bit of a dynamic, dimensional, feel. Here is a technique I’ll use from time to time. Basic solid text… A copy of the text pasted behind, colored black, and given a Gaussian blur (looks like a dropshadow, but we’re not done yet)… The blurred text … Continue reading Envelope-Transformed Label Shadows
Here is a re-visit to the earthquakes map I made long ago. This is actually a much different process, though I’m happy to see the visual results are quite similar. The Pacific Ring of Fire… The Mid-Atlantic Ridge… Follow the how-to process here if you are interested in trying out the technique. Happy Mapping! John Continue reading Earthquakes
A few years ago I made a couple of small simple maps that showed the locations of tweets in the New York City area that mention either “love” or “hate.” And another that shows “happy” or “sad.” It was a fun way to visualize social media terms as a proxy for the sentimental terrain of … Continue reading Twitter Sentiment in NYC
