I recently gave a talk at the WAURISA annual conference in Lynnwood, WA for the “Making Beautiful Maps” workshop. The talk was specific to Adobe Illustrator techniques but I started things off with a touch of what design is to me and why I think maps are attractive. The idea of this workshop was to [...]
I recently had a conversation with Sam Pepple (@drsvalbard) about cartography and its place as a profession and a practice. It was a quick and spontaneous chat but it made me think about cartography as a study. When I began cartography courses in school, I assumed I was learning how to become a cartographer. How [...]
Lately, I have using the ArcGIS JavaScript API to develop internal web mapping applications. The applications are useful when they are in the browser, but the engineers generally had no way to print the map. A question I often hear is, “Can you export this to PDF?” After some research, I came across an example [...]
I was planning on making a post for how to use the new Geotagged Photos to Point tool in ArcGIS, but then I found this tutorial by ESRI. The tool is pretty handy if you have a camera that stores geographic coordinates in the pictures it takes. Essentially, all you do is upload your pictures [...]
Every day there is a new map or app that pops into my twitter feed that deserves attention. Wind maps, color applications, Facebook visualizations, to gather a few. They get an afternoon, maybe a full day’s worth of hits and come dinner time, most people have forgotten about it. Is it a lack of significance? [...]
This is a quick project of mine to experiment with different typefaces and see how a variety of styles can work together towards a common theme. The quote is a simple translation I ran into during work. There is a tendency to choose one or two typefaces in projects in order to keep things straightforward [...]
Chandler and I have been off the GISC grid for a while. I’m up in Seattle doing contract work for Google Maps during the day, but enjoy my evenings leading and creating through Situated Laboratories – founded with Rich Donohue. Chandler is living down in LA and working his socks off as a GIS technician [...]
Recently, Dr. Sarah Battersby from the University of South Carolina gave a talk on Web Mercator as the UW Geography Department’s weekly Yi-Fu Tuan lecture. Dr. Battersby broached an important concern–that Web Mercator could in fact be reshaping the way that young people picture the Earth, reverting society’s default mental image of the world to [...]
I added a new tutorial today on how to use the Select By Attribute operation in ArcGIS to perform more advanced queries on a dataset. Also in the works are new video tutorials! Stay tuned!
For those of you planning on attending the NACIS 2012 Annual Conference in Portland… we’ll see you there! The GISC is excited to be traveling in heavy numbers. Many students from the University of Wisconsin and some professionals from the area will be showing their cartographic support to the mapping community. If you haven’t had [...]
