Illustrated by Michael Karpovage of mapformation

Recently we teamed up once again with mapformation to create a unique illustrated map of The Biltmore Estate located in Asheville, NC.  This popular tourist attraction was once the home of the Vanderbilts and is the largest private residence in the United States.  We were asked to create 3 maps of the estate to be used on their website: a 2D overview map, and 3D oblique views of two specific areas of the estate.  Michael Karpovage did the 3D illustrations while we did the overall art direction, 2D map, and development of the interactive site.

You can see larger versions of the maps in our portfolio, and visit The Biltmore website to see the final interactive map we built for them.

The Cartography Design Annual is a collection of maps from some of the top cartographers in the world capturing the beauty of mapping. Compiled and edited by Nick Springer, the Cartography Design Annual collects a select group of maps published in the calendar year 2008. The maps cover a broad spectrum of cartographic styles: 3D birds-eye views, travel maps, historic-style maps, mountain maps, and many more. The Annual is published by Springer Cartographics LLC, with support from NACIS (the North American Cartographic Information Society). The book, in beautiful full-color with an overview and detail view of each map, is both a showcase for cartographers and a interesting collection for anyone who loves maps.

The first Cartography Design Annual was received with great praise and excitement from the cartographic community and so the series continues with this second edition. With a foreword by Tom Patterson of the U.S. National Park Service in the second edition, the release Cartography Design Annual series is becoming an anticipated event for cartographers.

The book contains 30 maps from cartographers in the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, and Poland. This is book #2 in what will be an annual series.

The editor, Nick Springer is also the founder of Cartotalk.com, the most popular online community for cartographers worldwide. “The first edition of the Cartography Design Annual was a bit of an experiment, but all of the great feedback I received form cartographers proved that there is a need for this kind of showcase.” said Mr. Springer. “I hope this year’s edition will gain even broader exposure outside the world of cartographers.”

Mr. Springer is the Founder and President of Springer Cartographics LLC in Crosswicks, NJ and has worked for Microsoft Corporation as a Product Designer creating mapping applications and also designs software for GPS navigation systems. He studied Geography and Cartography at Syracuse University.

We are extremely happy about yesterday’s launch of the new Natural Earth data set.  Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales.  The site is now fully available for downloading of all data.

The idea was to create tightly integrated vector and raster data, to make it much easier to make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.  Started by Nathaniel Kelso of the Washington Post, and Tom Patterson of the U.S. National Park Service Natural Earth is a NACIS and MapGiving co-branded product with assistance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison cartography lab, Florida State University, and others including Springer Cartographics (we designed the logo and did the design and development of the website).

One of the goals of Natural Earth is to help solve a major problem in cartography: finding suitable data for making small-scale maps. The web is awash in geospatial data, and cartographers are forced to waste time sifting through confusing tangles of poorly attributed data to make clean, legible maps.  The carefully generalized linework maintains consistent, recognizable geographic shapes at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Natural Earth was built from the ground up so you will find that all data layers align precisely with one another. For example, where rivers and country borders are one and the same, the lines are coincident.

I used a pre-release version of the data for the map in Sarah Palin’s book and it made the data gathering and editing process so much easier.  It was only about 30 minutes from download to GIS compilation to Illustrator export, rather than the usual hours of work.

Another goal is to include many features missing from people’s mental map of the world in the hope of improving overall geographic literacy.

The terms of use for Natural Earth are wide open: All versions of Natural Earth raster + vector map data found on this website are in the public domain. You may use the maps in any manner, including modifying the content and design, electronic dissemination, and offset printing.

A few places on the map are fictional locations, which had to be located based on the manuscript.  Without the assistance of Mr. Crichton it took some time to piece together the travel of the characters to figure out where he intended these fictional places to be located.

You can see a larger image in the portfolio.

The book publishing schedule was moved up from the spring of 2010 to November 17th, 2009 so we only had a few days to pull this map together.  We  used a polar equidistant azimuthal map projection centered on the North Pole to show Alaska’s position in the world.

You can see the full map in our portfolio.

We are very excited to have been a part of this book, creating the map of the route of flight 1549.  We used data published by the NTSB from the black box recorder to recreate the route, along with notes from Captain Sullenberger to annotate the events of that day.

The map was created in an oblique 3-dimensional style to help illustrate the flight path and hopeful give a sense of place to this event.

Please let us know if you have any problems with the new site.

While this is not technically a competition or an award, we will most likely not have room for all submissions, so maps will be chosen based on their design merits – aesthetic design and clarity of communication. You may submit as many maps as you would like, but each map should be submitted separately.

We hope to have the Cartography Design Annual #2 available for sale in early July. We are looking at new methods for printing and fulfilling the books to improve the quality and process.

We are also planning on offering reprints of maps featured in the Annual with permission form the copyright holders. If you choose to participate in the reprints, you will of course get a share of the proceeds. We will handle the transactions, printing, and fulfillment of the reprints, all you have to do is give us a press-ready file and permission.

If you have any questions you can contact us through www.CartographyAnnual.com

The meeting is a 3 day event, with the first day dedicated to “Practical Cartography Day” which showcased software demos and presentations about the processes of actually creating maps.  For the 2009 meeting in Sacramento, I will be coordinating the PCD session along with Neil Allen of Allan Cartography.  The sessions on days 2 and 3 are papers and presentations with typically a more theoretical approach, with lots of interesting topics.

This year I went a day early to participate in the MapGiving event, a 12-hour map-a-thon where 2 teams produced maps pro-bono for the Hank Aaron State Trail in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I was the captain of the team producing the interactive version of the map, along with Jim Meacham (Univ. or Oregon InfoGraphics Lab), Jeremy White (Blueshirt.com and a grad student at the Univ. of Wisconsin), and Nat Case (Hedberg Maps).

We started at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon with a briefing from the folks at Friends of the Hank Aaron State Trail and then dove in to make a trail map.  Nat cooridinated with the other team of cartographers, charged with making a print map, and helped us share their data resources.  Jim and I focused on the UI for the interactive portion as well as the visual design of the map.  Jeremy focused on the Flash code for the map, and was very focused throughout the night.  By about 2AM, Jim and I had completed the map design and handed it off to Jeremy to integrate.  Officially the event was supposed to end at 4AM, but Jeremy continued to work through the night until 7AM to squash the last bugs in the Flash piece.

The MapGiving organizers, Lou Cross (Florida State University) and Tanya Buckingham (XNR Productions), live-blogged the event through the night.  The event was even covered by the local news media, including this video.

All in all it was a great experience.  I got to collaborate with some greate cartographers, help out a needy organization, and promote MapGiving which is a new endeavor but one with lots of promise.  Going forward I think this type of event will need to evolve.  The 12 hour marathon was fun, but I am afraid the quality of the maps suffered to some degree as we did not have enough time to properly research the trail and prepare the data. On the other hand, I was amazed at how well we were all able to pull together the maps given the time frame and state of the data.

The timing of the event into the wee hours before the rest of the conference made all of us a bit wiped out the rest of the week, but I’m sure many cartographers will be willing to donate their time, but in a more one-on-one setting.  I certainly would.