Archive for category News

New Contest to Win A Copy of City Maps

Posted by G.P. in City Maps Coloring Book, News on April 27, 2016

******UPDATE: Both books have been won.******

I’m doing a new contest this week to give away two copies of City Maps: A Coloring Book for Adults!

Last week’s contest was a trial, and I apparently set the odds too low (1 in 100) and nobody won. So this time the odds are set at 1 in 10 and there are two books to give away. That means you have a really good shot to win one! All you have to do is click the link and then click the bouncing box icon to see if you’ve won.

As per last time I am only publicizing this on the blog for now. If there are no winners by the end of the business day I might publicize it on twitter too. The contest runs for 24 hours.

Please click the link below to enter the contest. Also please consider reviewing the book on Amazon (positive or negative) because every single review helps me out enormously.

LINK TO ENTER CONTEST

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Today’s David Rumsey Talk on Pictorial Maps

Posted by G.P. in Education, News on April 21, 2016



Today was the second day of events celebrating the opening of the new David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. I was fortunate to be in the area already, giving a cartography workshop, and took the opportunity to go down and hear Rumsey give a short lecture on pictorial maps through the ages.

As soon as the talk began I took a quick picture for twitter, which was immediately seen by the guy in front of me. And thus BurritoJustice and I finally met in real life. Funny how things work out like that.

In his talk, Rumsey went over a plenitude of historical pieces at break-neck pace:

And used the term “visual culture,” which seemed a very apt phrase and well worth noting for future use. He explained that the era between 1915 to pre-World War II was especially rich with pictorial maps, created primarily for adventure, travel, and humorous purposes. He concentrated on pictorial maps from America, Europe, and Japan and remarked that 1926 in particular was an “amazing year for pictorial maps.”




The David Rumsey Map Center is located in Cecil H. Green Library, Bing Wing, 4th floor, Stanford University. Hours are Monday-Friday, 1:00-5:00 pm.


20160421_144559

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*Win a free copy of City Maps*

Posted by G.P. in City Maps Coloring Book, News on April 18, 2016

*contest over–thanks everyone!*

Over 1,000 copies of City Maps: a coloring book for adults have sold in three weeks. This is pretty amazing for a self-published book and it is all due to my fantastic following on twitter, all you savvy Facebook users who have been sharing it around, and these articles from CityLab, GISLounge, and Curbed.

To celebrate, I’m trying out Amazon’s newish feature called Giveaways. Please be my guinea pigs for a chance to win a copy of City Maps!

I am only publicizing this contest right here on this blog. If I tweeted about it, all 100 entries would probably be taken in the first few minutes. This contest runs for 1 day only, there are a maximum number of 100 entrants, and 1 book to give away randomly among those entrants. In the future I will probably do bigger giveways with more books to win but for now we’ll start small and see how it goes.

Here is the contest link, click it to enter. (link removed, contest over)

By the way, Amazon is not the only place where you can get City Maps! You can buy it at several other online retailers, linked to below. You can also ask your local bookstore to order it for you.

Buy City Maps at Barnes and Noble online
Buy City Maps at Powell’s online

Regardless of where you get the book, I would really love it if you could help me out by writing a review–positive or negative–on the Amazon page. This book is self-published, so the book is in desperate need of this kind of word-of-mouth to keep things going. Thank you in advance and thank you to everyone who has already commented!

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Announcing City Maps: A coloring book for adults!

Posted by G.P. in City Maps Coloring Book, News on March 25, 2016

City Maps Cover

My latest endeavor is City Maps: A coloring book for adults. I’m excited about this because normally I make maps that are more scientific, regulatory, or otherwise government oriented but this is a collection of maps for everyone. And what’s more, everyone can color them just the way they want to! (I can hear some colleagues wishing they could just get their clients to color their own maps so they don’t have to hear the color criticisms like, “could you make it a bit more orangish?”)

This has been a labor of love. I know that it didn’t take me long from my twitter lamentation about there being a dearth of adult coloring books featuring maps, but I was helped along by the fact that I already know a bit about publishing and I happened to have a lot of time off my regular work for spring break. So naturally I spent it working on maps 24/7.

I’m not going to say it wasn’t fun to have a “map coloring lab” in the dining room either. You know, because the designs had to be tested. :)

Amazon doesn’t have the look inside feature populated yet so here’s a preview:

A subset of maps from the book, in thumbnail form.

A subset of maps from the book, in thumbnail form.

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Shhhh Coming Soon!

Posted by G.P. in City Maps Coloring Book, News on March 23, 2016

I haven’t posted this anywhere else yet, and won’t do so until next week. But I’m so excited about this I had to share with my small group of faithful blog readers…


coverpagesmall


It’ll be available soon. Very soon. Maybe next week even!

I haven’t even tweeted this thing yet. Shhhhhhhh.

Probably the most fun project I’ve done in years. :)

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Plan to Attend FOSS4GNA 2016

Posted by G.P. in Cartography Profession, News on March 22, 2016

Ever since the very successful FOSS4G conference in Denver 2011, the conference and its North American counterpart the FOSS4GNA conference, have been the go-to conferences for anyone involved in or interested in Free and Open Source Software with a Geospatial bent. My understanding is that the 2011 conference consisted of a veritable who’s-who of FOSS4G developers and power users. Despite the auspiciousness of the attendees the information exchange level was high.

I went to my first FOSS4GNA last year and can attest to the fact that the information exchange level is still high while also being inclusive of those who are new to FOSS4G with plenty of intro sessions for newbies. Of course we’re all newbies at one or more aspects of FOSS4G as it’s impossible to know all of the great things coming out of this community at an expert level. So this is the conference to delve deeply into your software of choice, dabble in libraries or packages that are entirely new to you, and swap great ideas for new possibilities with fellow attendees.

This year’s FOSS4GNA is in Raleigh, May 2-5. I plan to give a cheesy talk where I interweave bits of the Tony Robbins best-seller Awaken the Giant Within with a live demo of QGIS. Hope to see you there!


This slide may or may not be going into my FOSS4GNA 2016 talk.

This slide may or may not be going into my FOSS4GNA 2016 talk.

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