Stamen Design is really gaining ground in the “provide amazing cartographic products” category this year. Their latest addition is a fine art print of their watercolor web service, centered on Manhattan. I’m thrilled with this offering and their stated goal of creating more products like this in the future. Cartography is gaining attention, momentum, and excellence due to firms like Stamen Design. I know what I’m asking for come birthday time…

If you are shopping for map-related home furnishings, here’s a couple of items for sale at Ikea, last seen this past weekend while shopping at Ikea Centennial:

This world map poster is also shown on their site.

This pillow is also shown on their site here.

*No, I don’t have any affiliation with this store.

For your Friday reading enjoyment…Map Cookies! GIS / cartography firms should send these to clients and have them at their holiday parties. Cool.

Don Meltz (@DonMeltz) points us to a couple of sites that have map cookies on them:

This place seems to have made these cookies as a custom-order. I used their online form to find out how much it would cost for them to make me a few of these. We’ll see what they come back with as it would be nice to send them to people that I want to thank (they individually wrap them).

Apparently you can order a globe cookie cutter at this place, but they only show the cookie, not the cookie cutter. And, as Don pointed out, it does look like a lot of work. (Not that we cartographers shy away from a little bit of map fussiness, I’m sure.)

You can also get cookie cutters on Amazon, though the ones here don’t look very promising:

Here we have half of Michigan State. Mike Hyslop (@mikehyslop) points out that perhaps they’ve just got the picture wrong and that the rest of the state is actually included in the package as a separate cookie cutter. Let’s hope.

Mark Ireland points out that there’s even one for Wyoming – though I’m thinking that if you wanted Wyoming you might just cut them yourself?! (Another Wyoming map joke in this post). Also, not sure what projection this is in, but Wyoming is not that square.

I do have to point out that the U.S. cookie cutter from the same company looks like a good bet if you want to make your own map cookies:

As you know, I’ve been fooling around with map art lately. Yesterday and today I’ve been working on the global map series shown above. These would be perfect for note cards – with the map on the outside, and blank inside – for thank you notes and whatnot.*

So I added three new products to my long-ago abandoned cafepress shop with the designs. I like cafepress because I don’t have to do any of the printing or order fulfillment myself. I didn’t mark up the price much at all. Cafepress charges $9.99 for a pack of 10 note cards as their base price and I added a $1.01 mark-up. So they cost $11.00 for a pack of 10. That’s right, I’ll be getting rich soon. You know, if about a million people buy them.

Details
The images were first exported from ArcMap as .ai files at 800 dpi and set to the size of the note cards, which is 4.5″ by 5.75″. Then they were imported into Illustrator where I fooled around with effects until I got them to look much better. I used page 39 and page 35 of Colors For Maps for the colors (except in the case of the black/white map, of course).

If you want to buy some from the store, I’ll be so grateful for the extra coffee money.

*Sorry, Glenn (@gletham) but I’m not going to start a line of Target wallpaper anytime soon.

My recent attempts at map art (geoglitter map and Warholian maps) have nothing on these two installations that were in the news yesterday:

1) David Byrne’s “Tight Spot”

This is a giant inflated globe placed under the High Line. For those not in the know, David Byrne was a founding member of the Talking Heads and he’s done all kinds of things since then. This particular installation is located on an elevated park that runs through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York.

The first article I read on it (here) shows the actual finished art piece:

There were a couple of interesting bits in the article, including the fact that the finished piece “. . . is different from the small models and renderings he’d sent off to the fabricators in Minneapolis.” I’m guessing that this photo, found on another site, shows one of these original renderings, since it certainly looks a lot different from the one above:

Another quote from the article, this one from Byrne himself can give you something to ponder, “The worst is to be told, ‘Oh, just do anything you want to do.’ Things tend to create themselves when you lay out all the rules.”

2) Jello Map

The only thing I have to say about this 6-foot long map of the U.S. made entirely with jello is that I have deep respect for anyone who can actually get a single bowl of jello to set-up, let-alone the amount that must have gone into this.

FOR MORE MAP ART FUN:

• Axis Maps LLC has one of the best typographic map (i.e., maps made entirely with labels) series available for purchase. They are beautiful.
• Check out the bookThe Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography for all kinds of zany yet thought-provoking map art installations.

Creativity is an essential skill for geoanalysts. That’s right. I’m even writing an article about it for GISuser that will come out in the next month or so*. It’s a skill that can be acquired through deliberate and frequent practice.

Exercises that take very little time – such as doodles before a design meeting – help to activate the right-brain, but obviously so do larger endeavors. Indeed, it was such an endeavor that I undertook recently that I’m going to write about here.

After creating a nice little bit of map art for a friend’s birthday, I was pretty proud of myself. It’s a customized map, basically, but with a twist: I took the colors from a Warhol Monroe print and used them on the map, repeating it so that it had a quad look:

The effect was pretty neat so I tweeted it, got good reception, and then the business person in me thought “gee this would be cool if I could sell a few.” So then I got really excited about all the possibilities and started to plan how that could be accomplished.

Now, here’s something that anyone who’s ever had a “brilliant” idea in the past will understand: as soon as you start to research the brilliant idea you realize one or more of the following:

1. Implementation difficult to impossible to achieve
2. Someone’s already done it
3. Nobody wants to buy it
4. Marketing will be a time-suck
5. It doesn’t fit in with anything else you do.

For me, in this particular instance of idea-implementation fever, number 4 was the big issue. (Okay, number 3 may also be a big issue but perhaps quite related to number 4!) I’m a GIS analyst. I need to stop trying to market hobby-type stuff. Those were the thoughts that came crashing into my head, ready to deliver the final blow to my mental idea-prep session.

I drew up this graphic to explain the situation to my husband in a more succinct manner…

My husband was (slightly) more upbeat than me and drew in some bumps along the “continue begrudgingly” line to show that enthusiasm tends to go up and down over time.

At any rate I decided not to let the “no no”s get the best of me (that’s a phrase I am stealing from the book “A Sense of Urgency,” which is a pretty decent management book). So today I implemented the concept within Etsy by creating my own shop. Go take a look if you get the chance!

*If I ever get it finished.