My work is driven by small miracles. People pay me to come up with ideas, but I am not certain where they come from. I meet with a client, and they tell me what sort of information they want to convey, and why. They hand me some data, and maybe a sketch or two. I … Continue reading On Faith →

Longtime readers will know that I have had the privilege of serving as one of the two Editors of the Atlas of Design for the last few years. Now, however, my term has come to an end, and I am stepping away from the project. It's been an amazing experience, and I hope you will … Continue reading The Most Important Thing →

Here’s a fun little symbol design that I did back in 2013 and quite liked. At the time, a colleague of mine was mapping data from a bike rental program. Among many other things, he wanted to plot how many bikes were checked into and out of each of the city's docking stations over the … Continue reading Flowing Bicycles →

This post is adapted from a UNIGIS u_Lecture webinar I gave earlier this year. Design is human. It’s a simple statement, but to me a very useful one. When I set out to assemble the talk upon which this blog post is based, I hadn’t realized how many of my thoughts about doing good design … Continue reading Design is Human →

Continuing my trend of recording tips & tricks that I am commonly asked about, I thought I'd share my method for creating type knockouts in Adobe Illustrator (please note that I have no idea if that's a proper use of the term, nor do I know what other people call them). In the above image, … Continue reading Type Knockouts in Illustrator →

Since at least the time I started my river maps project, I've been interested in presenting the natural world in a more stylized visual language. It started with just rivers, but I've also been working on-and-off for the last couple of years on a map that also tackled terrain and vegetation. So, here it is. … Continue reading Natural Modernism →

Some months ago, I came up with a little joking idea: what if, instead of hexagonal or square bins, cartographers used Penrose tiles? A Penrose tiling is a form of tessellation. It's fun and unique in that it fills the entire plane, but has no repeats. Wikipedia has more detail about how these things are cool. … Continue reading Penrose Binning →

I use Twitter mostly, so this is my only medium in which to share thoughts that exceed 140 characters. I usually only put self-contained, finished pieces here, but today I'm going to just toss out a few random musings (also I'm sick and have not slept much for 4 days, so forgive any incoherence). What if we made … Continue reading The Immanent Textbook →

I've had occasion, from time to time, to show my colleagues in the UW Cartography Lab the technique I use to combine shaded relief with other map layers in Photoshop. After a recent request to share the technique again, I decided to make a video, so that people can watch at their own convenience. So, … Continue reading Adding Shaded Relief in Photoshop →

I’m constantly assembling, in my mind, a toolkit built out of little tricks that I see other cartographers pull off. I take pleasure in the small things. The big picture is important, and certainly we need to focus on telling a clear story that looks great, but it is the details that always interest me … Continue reading Tricks from the Historical Atlas of Canada →