Delight instead of Dollars — As a spatial professional of nearly 10 years, I’m keenly aware of the pay delta between Spatial and other similar fields like development or design. Every time I read a thinkpiece or snarky tweet about it, I sigh and look at my pay stub wistfully, imagining what could be. But…

My personal best practices for better map design — For the Vermont Center for Geographic Information “GeoEnlightenment” series, I was asked to share my personal cartography tips and tricks. To highlight my approach to designing maps, I decided to take the audience through a bad-to-better evolution of a new map. In this post, we’ll focus on making a useful…

Cartography from 2058 — I was casting about for map design idea one night, and my wife had a good suggestion. You’re always replicating old maps. Why not make the map from the future? Never one to turn down a challenge, I set my imagination into motion to try to picture what a map…

An Original Map by Cafe Imports — A few months ago, my buddy Ian (who roasts amazing coffee) tweeted a link to a global specialty coffee map created by Cafe Imports. This map caught my attention for several reasons. …

I was browsing Pinterest for map inspiration (Pinspiration?) and got the idea to do a worldwide map layout showing the four hemispheres. I hopped into Mike Bostock’s bl.ocks and found an example of the d3.orthographic projection. I forked the gist and started tweaking the translation settings to get snapshots of the four hemispheres. Using this Projection Explorer was a big help there. While I was tweaking the code in Atom, I used atom-live-server to watch the changes render live in Firefox. When I was satisfied with the settings, I took a screenshot.

I love the freedom of expression that comes from eschewing the typical data-driven approach to cartography, and mixing in additional disciplines like illustration, abstract art, or architectural design to a map. Below are a few fun finds from across the internet, stumbled upon via Pinterest. Source

I’m good at maps A client asked me for a line on a map, so I made it for them. It’s the Arctic circle at an oblique angle in an orthographic projection. I can also do it nadir.

My attempt to summarize the proceedings, plus my own thoughts, questions, and musings. Warning — No Lifeguard on Duty It’s frightening to say things on the internet. We all have thoughts, opinions, and viewpoints, and we love talking about them. But when we do, we run the risk of running…