Axis Maps’s Dave Heyman offers some advice on interactive map design—specifically, on the details, like colour usage and data interfaces. “Academic cartography provides good guidelines for thematic cartography, but interactivity and user-interface design are often ‘I know it when I see it’ type of things. What follows are 4 quick design concepts and techniques that can be applied in many situations to improve the look and feel of an interactive map.” [via]
Category: Cartography
New National Maps of Switzerland
Switzerland is updating its official map series. The new maps are digitally based and use new fonts, symbols and colours—railways, for example, are now in red. They replace the 1:25,000 series that dates back to the 1950s; all 247 sheets should be replaced by 2019. You can compare the old and new map designs on this interactive map (screencap above). [via]
Andy Woodruff: Beyond the Sea
Inspired by maps that attempt to show what’s across the ocean when you look out from the shore (like this one and this one), Andy Woodruff applies a bit more rigour (and some geometry) to ask what’s across the ocean when you look out in a straight line perpendicular from the shore. (The other maps simply followed parallels of latitude.) Follow a straight line perpendicular from a point on the shore of Newfoundland and you get to Australia (via great circle), not France.
Women in Cartography (Part 4)
Laura Bliss and Carlyn Osborn continue their series of blog posts on women in cartographic history at CityLab and Worlds Revealed, respectively. Bliss looks at 20th century women, including illustrators Louise E. Jefferson and Ruth Belew as well as seafloor mapper Marie Tharp; Osborn looks at Dutch mapmaker Anna van Westerstee Beek (1657–1717).
Previously: Women in Cartography; Women in Cartography (Continued); Women in Cartography (Part 3).
Women in Cartography (Part 3)
CityLab’s Laura Bliss has a second post on women and cartography, this time focusing on the work of 19th-century women cartographers, geographers and educators in the United States. The Library of Congress’s map blog, Worlds Revealed, focuses on the work (and maps) of one of those women, Emma Hart Willard.
Previously: Women in Cartography; Women in Cartography (Continued).
Women in Cartography (Continued)
On the Library of Congress’s map blog, a post about the women cartographers employed by the military and government during World War II—the so-called “Military Mapping Maidens.”
The Guardian has a brief item on ocean mapper Marie Tharp.
CityLab’s Laura Bliss presents a selection of maps by women mapmakers like Mary Ann Roque, the Haussard sisters and Shanawdithit, the last known member of the Beothuk people.
Previously: Women in Cartography.
Drawing Inspiration from Print Maps
Saman Bemel Benrud, a designer at Mapbox, looks to print maps for inspiration. “I like looking at print maps because they remind me how far web map design has to go. Even an average print map involves a designer making thousands of small decisions about where to place individual features and how to kern and size each label,” he writes. “You can’t work like that with web maps that are global and zoomable.” Still, he provides some favourite design elements from paper maps; it’d be interesting to see how they might be rendered online.
When Maps Lie
Andrew Wiseman’s “When Maps Lie” was posted on CityLab last year, but its importance is evergreen: it’s about map literacy, and how to avoid being fooled by confusing, misleading or simply bad maps. This is very much what Mark Monmonier did in How to Lie with Maps (see my review; Amazon, iBooks); Wiseman updates it for the social media age.
Maps are big these days. Blogs and news sites (including this one) frequently post maps and those maps often go viral—40 maps that explain the world, the favorite TV shows of each U.S. state, and so on. They’re all over Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and news organizations are understandably capitalizing on the power that maps clearly have in digital space: they can visualize a lot of data quickly and effectively. But they can also visualize a lot of data inaccurately and misleadingly.
It’s a must-read. [via]
Women in Cartography
Something worth mentioning on International Women’s Day: the Boston Public Library’s exhibition, Women in Cartography: Five Centuries of Accomplishments, opened last October and runs until 26 March at the Central Library’s Leventhal Map Center. The exhibition can also be viewed online.
A few books about women in cartography:
- Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt (Henry Holt, 2012), a biography of oceanographer Marie Tharp (Amazon, iBooks)
- Mrs. P’s Journey: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Created the A-Z Map by Sarah Hartley (2001), a biography of A-Z Map Company founder Phyllis Pearsall (Amazon UK)
- Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography by Will C. van den Hoonaard (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), a scholarly history of women mapmakers since the 16th century (Amazon)
Previously: Two More Map Books; Soundings: A Biography of Marie Tharp; The Urban Legend of Phyllis Pearsall; Phyllis Pearsall.
Maptorian Plus Kickstarter Campaign Launched
Three years ago Alejandro Polanco (who blogs about maps in Spanish at La Cartoteca) launched Maptorian, a collection of editable vector maps aimed at graphic designers, journalists, teachers, students and others who need to make maps, know how to use applications like Adobe Illustrator but don’t have a GIS background. Now a Kickstarter campaign has launched for the improved-expanded-updated sequel, Maptorian Plus. Read Alejandro’s post (in Spanish).
Map Colours and Colour Blindness
Using an online colour blindness simulator, Reddit user kalsoy has created the above image showing how map colours are perceived by people with various forms of colour vision deficiency. [via]
Previously: Ordnance Survey Announces Colour-Blind Map Style; Ordnance Survey Announces Colour-Blind Mapping.
The Atlantic on Tom Harrison
The Atlantic interviews Tom Harrison, an independent cartographer based in San Rafael, California who produces maps of California parks and wilderness areas for hikers and mountain bikers, about his individualistic mapmaking process. (Tom Harrison Maps at Amazon.) [via]
A Brief History of Cartography and Maps
Here’s a short video overview of the history of cartography and maps, courtesy of GeographyHub, that’s really about what was mapped—and mappable. [via]
Null Island
Zero degrees longitude, zero degrees latitude is literally nowhere: situated in the middle of the open ocean, off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, the only thing to mark its presence is a weather observation buoy [via]. But it’s also a significant set of coordinates, in that it’s the location you might get in the case of geocoding errors.
Hence the invention of Null Island, an imaginary place to flag geocoding failures. It shows up in version 1.3 of Natural Earth, for example, as an island one square metre in size, but coded so that it would never appear in an actual map. Gary Vicchi explains Null Island in more detail. As is the way of fictional places, Null Island has grown in the imagination: it has its own website, replete with sections on its history, geography, people and economy, and its own flag.
Copper Plates Used to Make Topo Maps on Display
The Michigan State University Map Library now has on display three copper plates used to make the 1912 USGS topographic map of the Lansing, Michigan area. “From the 1880s to the 1950s, the U.S. Geological Survey used engraved copper plates in the process of printing topographic and geographic quadrangle maps. Copper alloy engraving plates were inscribed with a mirror image of the points, contour lines, symbols, and text that constitute a topographic map. Each plate was inscribed with details for a single color of ink.” [via]