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.


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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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Geo Yoda Wisdom

Posted by G.P. in Uncategorized on April 15, 2016

For your Friday pleasure, a little GeYoda wisdom courtesy of the ever entertaining and wise Stephen Smith (@TheMapSmith)


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The Making of a Map

Posted by G.P. in Design on April 4, 2016

I made this map a few months ago. At full size it’s 8.5″ by 11″ and meant as a handout. There’s a slightly different, but mostly matching, digital companion map at the bottom of the Hood Canal Coordinating Council’s Where We Work page that I made in conjunction with this. A discussion concerning different elements of the map follows.

WhereWeWork_HCCC

HIGHLIGHT MAIN LOCATION A typical task in this kind of cartography work is to highlight the main area. This is usually done in ArcMap with a masking layer or in QGIS with an inverse polygon symbolization. Either way, you are essentially assigning a semi-transparent white symbol style to the area that is outside the map focus. In this case we have 5 overlapping polygons that represent the focus of the map so the solution was to merge all 5 polygons together so that the masking layer consisted of everything not in an HCCC watershed jurisdiction.

OVERLAPPING LINES There are several approaches one can take for the display of overlapping lines. One is to depict the lowest lines in larger width sizes and another is to offset the lines so that they are side-by-side. Neither of these solutions were appropriate for this map since there are too many overlaps. After much trial and error I settled on a transparency for the highest lines. When all lines overlap the net effect is for the overlapped area to appear brown, which is indicated in the legend. Note that the legend entries are stacked in the same order that the lines are stacked in the map.

LOGO Although I dislike putting logos on maps as a general rule, there is often no way around it when the client requires it. In this case the map looks just fine with the HCCC’s single-color logo placed at bottom-left, which is the location at the bottom of the visual hierarchy.

TITLE The title has a subtle drop-shadow created in Inkscape by simply copying the text, nudging the lowest text down and to the right, and copying the grayish land color for the drop-shadow color. The main title text color matches the client’s logo exactly.

COLORS The orange boundary is the same color as other orange features on the client’s website. All the boundary colors match the digital map on the client’s website.

LABELS River labels on the main fish streams are extremely important for this map. They were done by hand in Inkscape and in many cases the individual letters were hand-nudged at 200% so that they would conform as well as possible with the sinuosity of the streams. The tribe labels match the color of the tribe polygons. In the online version of this map linked to at the beginning of the blog post, the smallest tribe (in terms of area) isn’t visible at the scale of the other features. The solution for that problem was to depict the tribes as points at the lower zooms and dynamically change them back into their representative polygons at the higher zooms.

SCALE BAR AND NORTH ARROW The scale bar is a custom, simple, graphic to keep the emphasis on the map and the legend. “Miles” is not capitalized, which further de-emphasizes itself and is in keeping with some more modern practices. The north arrow is likewise fairly simple. Both match the client’s logo color. 

TEXT All text except the river labels is Museo Sans. Including the “miles” label in the scale bar, the title, legend, town labels, county labels, and tribe labels. (The river labels are in Georgia since natural features are typically labeled in a serif font.) I chose Museo Sans because it’s friendly, highly legible, and fresh. I’m going to go ahead and say it again: even the scale bar text was changed to match the map font. Don’t settle for defaults! Make your typefaces cohesive. Okay, getting off my soapbox now…

Those are the main cartographic decisions that were made, each appearing to be an easy decision but all were considered very carefully with regard to the audience and the matching digital map. Possibly 20 different color combinations were considered, for example. In all, you might be surprised at the length of time it took to make this seemingly simple map. 😉

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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…


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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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