Archive for December, 2011
Several Maps Noted This Week
Posted by Gretchen in Cartography Profession on December 13, 2011
There are so many map styles out there, some new, some old. Some old styles are being resurrected by some brave cartography professionals, some new styles are being bravely invented by the same. Here are a few of the varying styles that I took note of this week.
- Vintage Picture Map This one is reportedly from a 1931 school book (and is for sale on Etsy, click the picture to go to the sales site. No, I don’t have any stake in this, just liked the map!). Note that these maps often have a single drab brown background, minimal labeling and feature boundaries, and lots of varied stylistic relief. There are plenty of people out there who would love a vintage-looking map like this that is personalized just for them. If you are looking for a niche, this might be one to explore.
- Dark Colors A very modern approach is to use very bold colors throughout the map composition. Take a look at this recent example, shown here, that is for a National Geographic iPad app (thanks to @RosemaryDaley).
- Free Many of us have no idea how the “free” “business model” approach is going to pan out but here’s another entry that I’m sure everyone is happy about. This one, by Tom Patterson, is a very nicely done map of the Hawaii seafloor. He’s made it available as a downloadable wall map jpeg file so that you can have it printed and put on your wall.
Map Cookies
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:
Books on Creativity
Posted by Gretchen in Creativity on December 8, 2011
In the LINKS section, you’ll find a lot of great references to books on creativity. I highly recommend asking for one or two of these for Christmas (or for whatever you celebrate). Alternatively, see if your local library has them. Even if the library doesn’t have a copy, they often have a process by which patrons can request basically any book they want, and the library will get it for them (if you’re in the U.S.). These are fun books that don’t take a huge amount of brain power but which can help you along in many ways:
- If you need some new business ideas
- If you want to take your mapping to the next level
- If you want to be one of those “big idea people” at work
- If your current analytical processes need updating
Even if you don’t know how creativity science might help you I still recommend learning a little bit about it. The main thing for folks who are analysts and programmers, especially (but even cartographers sometimes), is that there are exercises that don’t take long, that anyone can do, that allow the brain to come up with novel approaches to the problems it’s mulling over.
The other day I was trying to solve a little analysis problem: how to construct a variable-width buffer that is dependent on elevation? I googled it and searched the Esri forums and got some ideas, but a solution was still elusive. I printed out some graph paper (here’s a site to print out graph paper) and tried to take a look at the problem visually. That got me a bit closer but still without a complete answer. Then I tried a creativity trick that I often employ – change of scenery. So, getting out from behind my desk and standing by the fireplace, I had the solution in about 5 minutes of thinking it through.
I’m a big reader, so I never feel like just one book is enough, but if there’s just one that you want to look at, I’d highly recommend this one:
Birthday and Family Maps
I’m just finishing the second birthday map that I’ve been asked to create this year. It’s a map of one U.S. state with various towns magnified and shown as insets around the main map. The main map is a topo-map with roads, county and city labels, topography, and so on. The insets are aerial photos of particular homes or areas where particular homes used to be. Interestingly, one of the insets is of a small airport, which is the site of the birthday person’s grandparent’s old farm. Since it is a nostalgic piece I chose some fancy typefaces: Elephant by Matthew Carter for the title and some supporting information and ITC Stone Serif Medium for a larger text block.
The insets are not placed on a grid in-line with the state map because this looked sterile, especially for the more intimate type of map that this is. So instead I simply fit the insets in where they would fit, in a more organic manner. There’s even a small baby picture of the person for whom the map was made on there. There’s a small picture of the map here just so you can get a bit of an idea of what I’m talking about. Please realize that, to protect the recipient’s privacy, I’m only posting a thumbnail. (Also, the title is boxed-out because it includes the person’s name.) It’s designed for a standard frame: 16″ x 20″ with a 1″ white-space around all sides.
So, if you’re a map-maker, maybe this will inspire you to add this type of mapping to your repertoire. If you are not a map-maker and would like me to make one of these for someone in your family, let me know.
MapSpeller Review
I’ve just been evaluating the MapSpeller extension to ArcMap, at the request of Edgetech America. An employee there had noticed my admonitions to map makers to do spell checking and asked if I’d evaluate their product.*
The key thing about MapSpeller is that it is a location-sensitive spell checker. For example, you might tell it that “Peterson” street is spelled incorrectly and should be “Petersen.” When it spell-checks that area again on the same or on another map that you’ve made, it’ll remember that that location label is “Petersen.” If there’s another street on the same map named “Peterson” it’ll be able to differentiate the two. This is a great thing for massive map labeling projects. Their term for this feature is locationary. It also takes into account what words are not likely to be placed on a map but are similar to words that would be used on a map. For example, it’ll mark “sight” as a potential misspelling for “site”.
Using the extension was easy and intuitive. The only major downside was that the install process was a bit cumbersome in that you had to unzip and save three text files to a certain directory on your machine. It would be nice if that were automated. One license for the standard version is $295. The key difference between the professional and the standard versions seems to be that the professional version has the capability to spell check attribute tables while the standard version does not (it just spell checks what is on screen). Check out their website for other licensing options for large firms and the like.
There are plenty of customization options just like in full-featured word processing software. You can chose to have it not check words in all-caps, camel case, and/or upper-case. There are three English dictionaries to choose from: UK, Canada, and US (additional language dictionaries are planned, according to their website). You can also change the distance at which the locationary determines if a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly.
The really great thing is that there’s a full-featured evaluation version that lasts for 3 months. So it is definitely worth checking out!
*I was not paid for this review.
Client Changes: Insult or Business as Usual?
Posted by Gretchen in Cartography Profession on December 2, 2011
An old joke:
Person 1: “I was just thinking…”
Person 2 interrupts, saying: “We don’t have time to waste!”
Anyway, as a blogger I can start out with “I was just thinking” and not have anyone come in with a silly joke, so here goes:
I was just thinking yesterday about client feedback and whether it is to be taken as an insult or as a normal part of business. People feel differently about this issue. I’ve been known to say in the past that working back and forth with a client on design issues such as color choices is a part of doing business in the mapping field.
However, yesterday I tweeted about an article in the Washington Post (via @geofeminina), that quotes a map artist as saying, “I’ve had to occasionally call somebody up after they’ve used a computer program to alter the color or proportions and say, ‘Take my name off of it. That isn’t how I painted it.”
The map artist quoted here is none other than the person who makes most of the ski trail maps around the world. He’s obviously quite an expert at it. My tweet was: “Even the masters have clients who want to change their colors! Insulting.”
So in this particular case I found it insulting. But I also feel that back-and-forth between client and map maker is a perfectly acceptable part of doing business.* Why is there a discrepancy? Is it because this guy is an obvious expert? No, I think that the real reason this was insulting is that his work was altered after he submitted it. Ideally, the client would have asked to change colors before the piece was finished.
Interior designers, architects, and landscape architects will often say things like, “I loved the client for this project, he was decisive and open to suggestion” – which leads us to believe that these fields all expect a collaborative approach to project work rather than a one-sided situation. Map making needs to have the same type of expectation toward collaboration with the client. Furthermore, in one of these other fields, I do think it would be insulting if say, you designed someone’s interior, then they turned around and put in, say some garish focal piece, and then they published it in a magazine along with your name. That just seems sneaky. So there’s the difference that I see between the two situations. What do you think?
*I run my business that way: all client feedback is welcome at all times.
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