The other day I wrote a Story Map describing my struggle to find affordable housing for my young family as a new cog in the workforce. It included a version of this map (here’s how to make it)… The mapped units are years of labor, at the current median income, to reach the median price … Continue reading How Many Years of Life Does That House Cost?
or, Cobbling Together Screenshots to Create Stereopairs If you ever had an “airphoto interpretation” class, and you are at least as old as me, then you likely peered through these suckers in a geography lab somewhere to view pairs of offset imagery in pseudo-3D. And, if you did it enough, you probably got to where … Continue reading 3D Brain Hack
Here is a walkability map of Seattle, showing areas reachable via a casual stroll within 1, 2, and 3 hours. The geography of Seattle is warped to conform to these walkability rings. In 2011 Kirk Goldsberry showed me a yellowed old draft manuscript of Waldo Tobler’s (covered in his hand-written notes; it was awesome) in … Continue reading Time Warp Walkability Map of Seattle
I just read that North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that reached 2,300 miles high. That seemed awfully high to me. I wondered what that actually looked like. This is how high that is… Here is a step-by-step process on how this diagram was made. Continue reading 2,300 Miles High Looks Like This
Here is another look at the 2016 presidential election. This map uses adjacent proportional semi-circles to directly compare the number of votes between two parties. This head-to-head method is a bit better at reducing the symbol overlap issue of a standard proportional map that uses co-incident full circles. There’s enough overlap issue in this map … Continue reading On the Bubble
It’s an election cartogram, ok. But I tacked on some tacky graphics so now the hexagons look like cubes! Pew pew! If you are curious about how to make it, and/or want to re-use my cubifying graphics (a “cube front” image and a “cube back” image sandwich the graduated symbol layer) then have at it … Continue reading Electo-Cubo-Gram
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
