Adventures In Mapping

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

Because I already had the data, and I like cobbling together clunky animated GIFs, here is a little visualization of the local recruitment neighborhoods for the top 25 college football programs. In some cases, these drive times mean very little, since teams like Stanford and Notre Dame don’t really recruit from local areas. But most … Continue reading Recruitment Neighborhoods