Month: August 2025

How xkcd Does Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd web comic, posts a surprising amount of map-related content, which I invariably end up linking to here. With some exceptions, they fall into one of two categories, each of which has a recent example.

The first category is a hand-drawn infographic map showing, in earnest, some interesting or surprising information. See, for example, this map showing the most observed animal or plant in each U.S. state:

Randall Munroe, “iNaturalist Animals and Plants,” xkcd, 21 Jul 2025.

Other maps of this ilk include drainage basins, lesser-known towns sharing a famous place name, least informative Google Trends maps, and maps of the 2016, 2018 (challengers) and 2020 elections.

The second category is where Randall chooses the path of violence, with maps clearly designed by Black Hat Guy to hurt our brains. These include a series of maps that mangle U.S. state borders (1, 2, 3). But the most insidious are his Bad Maps Projections series, the most recent of which projects continents onto their own globes:

Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheres,” xkcd, 30 Jul 2025.

Thing is, this one isn’t as brain-curdling, because similar globes—globes that depict a portion of the world on an entire sphere—exist in the real world.

Ordnance Survey Settles with Family Business Over Map Blanket Design Dispute

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Sunday Times reports [Apple News+ link] that a small family business selling map-themed picnic blankets has reached a settlement with the Ordnance Survey. Rubbaglove’s PACMAT series was launched in partnership with the OS, but their sales “stalled” after the OS launched their own line of “almost identical” blankets, which, they said, violated their design trademark. In addition to a monetary settlement, the OS has agreed not to sell competing products for 10 years.

3D Printed Tactile Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Touch Mapper is an open source project (GitHub) for generating 3D printed tactile maps for the visually impaired. The maps use OpenStreetMap data and produce a file that can be printed on almost any 3D printer, or ordered for a fee. The project started nearly a decade ago but I only stumbled across it today.

Previously: 3D Printed Maps for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

At the Newberry in October

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Several things coming up at Chicago’s Newberry Library in October:

An exhibition, Mapping Outside the Lines, runs from 9 October 2025 to 14 February 26 at the Newberry’s Trienens Galleries.

For centuries, mapmakers have experimented with the placement, density, and purpose of lines like these to make maps seem simple and objective. Just follow this line and you’ll have everything you need—or so the map leads you to believe. These lines are never as straightforward as they seem. This exhibition follows lines on maps to their extremes. By exploring how maps use lines to make the world legible, the exhibition will bring you through examples of mapmakers and artists who have created, bent, and broken these linear rules. By following these lines, you will find maps to be more complex and more motley than they ever imagined!

The 22nd annual Nebenzahl Lecture Series, Mapping from Mexico: New Narratives for the History of Cartography, runs from 16 to 18 October 2025.

The 2025 Nebenzahl Lectures continue to promote new thinking in map history by asking how orienting our stories from Mexico, looking out toward the rest of the world, challenges common narratives and popular assumptions in the history of mapmaking. Despite the prominent role mapping in Mexico has played, cartographic histories are often told from a European perspective. But how do the stories we tell, methodological assumptions we make, and categories we define about maps and map history change when we treat sites of production and reception in Mexico—from Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla to the borderlands—with the same specificity map history has given to European centers?

The Newberry is also hosting a rare map and book fair the same weekend to coincide with the Nebenzahl Lectures.