Over at PetersonGIS we’ve just completely re-done the company website. We’re going for streamlined, concise, and most importantly, mobile-friendly. That’s right, we’ve fully embraced the one-page website! Please take a look and let us know what you think!

PetersonGIS’s New Company Website

Bristle Maps: A new visual technique to map more than one variable at a time, on linear features.

O’Reilly Webcast tomorrow: GitHub for Designers. Hat tip GISuser.com.

Climate Tools Webinar, also tomorrow: Includes information on Nature Conservancy and BASINS spatial data.

Is Cartography Dead? A discussion focusing on the benefits of focusing on the storytelling angle. (See also To Cartography Or Not To Be.)

Population Map: A simple yet powerful message (do we know the veracity of this?)

The books on display at the Esri DevSummit. Thanks to Rich Ruh for the pic.

I’m happy to announce that the style defaults that I helped to establish for Urban Mapping’s Mapfluence platform are now live. These defaults appear when a developer adds a dataset without specifying color, line width, and so on. While it is a difficult exercise to try and anticipate what will look good for all datasets, we feel these have a modern yet universal appeal that will enable developers to get started quickly.

Dear Readers,

If you have one or both of my books and they have been helpful in your work, could you spare a moment to please visit the Amazon pages for the books and press the “like” facebook button? You can just click on the book links in the right-hand sidebar to go directly to each page.

I get a lot of great feedback from readers via private email (thanks, keep it coming!) but would love to be able to get that word out to others who are considering the purchase of these books. I’m pretty much on my own with marketing, even for the traditionally-published GIS Cartography text. If you were inclined to write an Amazon review, that would be great too, but I do know this takes a bit longer!

Edited to add: here are the links to the books for those who are getting this through RSS.
Cartographer’s Toolkit: Colors, Typography, Patterns
GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design

Cheers,
Gretchen

• I’ll be giving the closing plenary at the 19th annual California GIS conference in April: CalGIS. Hope to see you there!
  
  

• My favorite Shakespeare quote: “Be not afraid of cartography: some are born mappers … and some have map design thrust upon them.” (Well, at least I think that’s what the quote is. Wink wink.)




• CNN featured MIT Media Lab’s interactive dot map that shows one dot per person in the U.S. and Canada. If you read the comments you can gain some good insight into how the general public thinks about analytical maps. For one thing, several commenters neglected to realize that the dots are placed randomly within blocks. The general public probably doesn’t know that, while the block is the smallest unit of area for which the Bureau of the Census collects data, a block averages about 100 people, though it can vary from zero to several hundred. For another, some didn’t realize you could “show labels” and “hide labels” with the buttons provided in the upper-right. You don’t have to develop maps for the lowest common denominator, of course, but you do need to keep in mind what that is and mitigate as best as possible. (And I am in no way criticizing the dot map, which is, indeed a fabulous work of Python scriptism.)




• Thank you to GISNuts.com for sending me this great nerd-wear! I am sure that I wasn’t nearly nerdy enough without these t-shirts and the key ring. If you, too, aspire to wear your GIS love on your sleeve, as it were, it looks like GISNuts.com is still sending free t-shirts to the first 50 people who sign up to use their forums.