The maps of the Bruised Borders story are a combination of a customized vector tile basemap and border polygons with image texture fills, assembled in ArcGIS Online. The cartographic theme is that of actively wounded boundaries between nations. The basemap looks a little like skin, and the disputed boundaries are meant to resemble abrasion. A bit … Continue reading The cartography of the Bruised Borders story
Lately I’ve fallen into a tender trap of draping Digital Elevation Models over aerial imagery to make them look misty, plastic-y, and painterly. But, late on a Friday, feeling pre-apocalyptic I suppose, it occurred to me that there was no reason I couldn’t also mis-use DEMs to make our beautiful Earth look like it was … Continue reading The Digital Elevation Model from Hell
In the process of researching and writing the Mary Edwards Walker (the only female Medal of Honor recipient) story map, I came to be fully impressed with her. I didn’t know about her before this, but I’m so glad to have come to learn part of her story, and also excited to share it. As … Continue reading The cartography of the Mary Edwards Walker story
Recently, at the nacis 2016 conference, I enjoying the presentation by Michael Higgins, of Summit Terragraphics, describing the process of making thermoformed raised relief maps (cool 3D vinyl maps) -and even got to handle one. Then, I saw this picture from Tom Smedley, of a wall-mounted 3D map installation at Gettysburg. I love these things. They … Continue reading How To: Fake Plastic Map
It was 2004. I was wrapping up a masters degree in “GeoScience” at Central Michigan University. Married, and with a young son, I wanted badly to lock something, anything, down before graduation. I had a faint but growing sense of urgency, having heard nothing back from the hordes of resumes and applications that I’d been sending … Continue reading My Bad Interview
My favorite cartography conference is coming up this week, and in advance, I’m getting my presentation materials online. So here! The topic is “Firefly Cartography” which is a made up thing. I’ll describe it, talk about how it may be an effective grabber of eyes, and how those qualities also make it a helpful technique for … Continue reading Firefly Cartography
It is amazing (and somehow chilling) to me that the information I am seeing on my screen is often sent to me from another continent, along the myriad ups and downs of the dark surface of a seafloor, in the blink of an eye. While it is easy to think of digital information as purely … Continue reading The Depths of Information
Blending-Mode Label Coloring Last winter, I was experimenting with applying blending modes to label text, as a way of annotating a map without a heavy-handed solid fill or double stroke. I wanted the labels to recede when looking at the map as a whole, but then appear if the eye stopped for a closer look. Labels … Continue reading Ghost Labels
Recently, I was tinkering with ways of creating the illusion of depth for mapping water. The gist is that you can use increasing opacity in deeper areas to get the effect of diffused light and reduced visibility. Like in real life. But there is no reason you have to go restricting your shenanigans to ocean environments. … Continue reading Misty Mountains
I love binning things up into hexagons. So much cooler looking than image heatmaps, and you can interact with them. More complex than squares, so you get some geometric variability in your surface, but just compact enough so that the shape isn’t distracting. Plus, nature loves the hexagon, so we are wired to admire it. Why fight … Continue reading Hexperiment
