2022 Freelance Survey

It's that time again! If you've been following me for a while, you know that every other year, Aly Ollivierre and I conduct a survey of freelance mapmakers. The 2022 survey is now out and awaiting your data! TAKE THE SURVEY I hope you'll share this widely, so that we can reach enough people to …

A Generalization Ramble

Spatial accuracy is not always your friend. A few weeks ago I wrote about the potential downsides of making an overly-detailed shaded relief image. It’s easy for readers to miss the major landforms, as they are hidden under the highly-detailed noise of the individual hills and bumps. I truly understand the urge to show all …

Towards Less Blender-y Relief

In the years since I stumbled across the idea of creating shaded relief in Blender, I’ve been amazed at the extent to which the cartographic community has adopted this technique. This was wholly unexpected: I’ve seen plenty of relief tricks come and go without achieving widespread adoption. This makes sense, given that there’s no “right” …

Annual Report: 2021

Friends, colleagues, and patrons, it's time for my Annual Report. You're all so kind as to support my work each year with donations and with spreading the word, and I try to be transparent with you about what exactly you're supporting. This year it felt like I had a lot less time to devote to …

Landforms of Michigan: A Mini-Tour

Today I'm going to steal an idea from Anton Thomas. A while back, he released North America: Portrait of a Continent, which is a masterpiece well worth looking at. As part of that release, he also used pieces of the map to take people on virtual tours of the map, and the landscape it depicts. …

Dividing up the Continents

Friends, I wanted to share with you a project that I recently completed: Continental Divides, a series of six 42 × 51cm (16.5 × 20.1in) cyanotype posters. We’ll dive into the details, below, but first: you can indeed buy copies of any (or all) of these if you’d like. Each one is hand-printed, so there …

A Call for Maps from the Heart

I have long been interested in the intersection between the cartographic and the personal. While we make maps for clients or employers, many of us also use our cartographic skills as an outlet for self expression. At this year's NACIS Annual Meeting, I'd like to assemble an exhibition of more personal pieces. I invite you …

On Edges

I use a lot of subtle effects in my mapping work. Knockouts, inner glows, blurs, and other such tricks help me separate land from water, or keep my text legible. Until recently, I thought of all of these tools separately, each one for use in its own situation. However, in the last year or so, …

Blurring Backgrounds to Improve Text Legibility

In past years, I've talked about how to improve the legibility of text using both knockouts and halos. Since I wrote those guides, I've added one more tool to my arsenal: blurring. This is a technique that was shown to me by Joshua Stevens, who suggested it in a Twitter conversation a few years ago. …

Trying a Kickstarter

Kindly readers, the time has come, as it must for all Internet denizens, for me to venture into the land of Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pinakographos/the-landforms-of-michigan-offset-print-edition Over the years, I've featured a lot of maps on this blog and on my Twitter account, and almost none of them have been printed. Those that do get end up in …