Archive for September, 2011

FOSS4G and the Geo User-Base

Posted by Gretchen in News on September 12, 2011

FOSS4G 2011 anticipates about 1,000 people to attend this year’s global conference in Denver this week. Over 13,000 (reference) attendees were at the 2011 Esri International User Conference. Now, Esri’s suite of software and “other” products is quite large. But so is the FOSS4G suite. In fact, here’s twitter’s @spara’s fantastic mind map that shows most of the FOSS4G projects as well as the Esri products, just to give a visual of how much is out there:

So this leads one to wonder…Is the FOSS4G user-base really only 1/13th that of Esri’s? There is a lot of evangelism out there on the superiority of FOSS4G products. Is this just hype, then, or is it reality? If reality, then FOSS4G has a huge user-base out there waiting to embrace it.

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Map of the World’s Newspapers

Posted by Gretchen in Design on September 12, 2011

This map of The World’s Newspapers * has some nice things going for it:

The first thing that we notice is that it isn’t over-styled. All the blue tones are muted, the red circles don’t have any casings (they stand out enough on their own without being outlined), there aren’t extraneous details like ocean colors or labels, and the authorship information and date are readily available.

It appears as though the mappers decided not to delineate each county with an outline, though I think that they might have done well to have considered doing so. It’s odd that only the No Data countries have outlines. Other than that, seems like a nice, simple, effective map for it’s purpose, audience and medium.

*By Dr. Mark Graham, Scott A. Hale and Monica Stephens in collaboration with Dr Corinne M. Flick and the Convoco Foundation.

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Map Art and Idea Implementation

Posted by Gretchen in Map Art on September 6, 2011

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:

Implementation difficult to impossible to achieve
Someone’s already done it
Nobody wants to buy it
Marketing will be a time-suck
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.

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