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 … Continue reading Dividing up the Continents
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 … Continue reading A Call for Maps from the Heart
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, … Continue reading On Edges
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. … Continue reading Blurring Backgrounds to Improve Text Legibility
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 … Continue reading Trying a Kickstarter
As is now my annual tradition, it's time for me to tell everyone how much money I make! Why? Well, I find the financial opacity of the freelance world a bit intimidating, and I suspect that some others do, too—particularly those who are interested in freelancing, but haven't yet jumped in. So I’d like to … Continue reading Financial Transparency: 2020 Edition
When I gave my NACIS 2020 talk, A Few Thoughts on Critique, I was very careful to avoid the appearance of telling people what to do. I offered only suggestions that people might consider if they chose to improve their critique practices. I feared that any stronger language, saying what I thought people should or … Continue reading Critique with Empathy
Every year I look forward to attending the NACIS conference in October; it's a chance to reunite with old friends, learn a bunch of new things, and come away inspired to improve my own cartographic practice. While I'm there, I also like to share my thoughts with whoever will pay attention to me, by offering … Continue reading A Few Thoughts on Critique
Friends, each year you are kind enough to offer some financial support to my various map-related efforts, and in turn, as is my annual tradition, I want to be transparent in reporting back on what, exactly, those efforts were. With your support, in 2020, I was able to (in no particular order): Organize How to … Continue reading Annual Report: 2020
I spend a lot of my time making little cartographic pieces that don't make it onto this blog. They're just small, quick items that don't really need a whole writeup, though I've previously collected some of them into "Odds and Ends" posts. Those entries, though, only cover a fraction of the cartographic ephemera I put … Continue reading An Atlas of Minor Projects
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