So when you map them, go ahead and omit most of the Pacific. It’s empty anyway.
The same goes for Terra Australis, but it is customary to retain an “Antarctica” label as a joke.
Seen at Franklin Park Conservatory, Columbus, Ohio.
Tagged antarctica, bad maps, pacific | 6 comments
In the past I have mentioned here an ongoing project to trace my every movement on a map, using memory and mouse-clicking rather than technology that costs money. Well, the advent of 2010 marks a full calendar year of doing this and a good moment to show some results.
Obviously this is not a novel concept (to choose a single example, I must link to UrbanTick here), and nobody besides me cares about the particulars of my travels. Shut up, it’s fun anyway. There are two reasons why this originally sounded interesting. First, I work from home, and there is very little routine in my trips out of the house, both in timing and destination. Rather than a predictable daily grind, I could hope for a an unknown awesome-looking pattern. Second, I keep the tracks separated by mode of transportation (foot, car, train, bus, and bike so far). A portrait of urban mobility or some such. As I bonus I will add that for a urban geography and cartography nerd, this project works as motivation to get out and explore different parts of town. There are witnesses to my excitement over being able to add a new line to the map.
Anyway, below is a little Flash animation of daily travels, with some transparency to highlight hot spots. I gave up on trying to do this beyond the immediate local area (Cambridge, Massachusetts)*, so there are some noticeable pauses where I disappeared for weeks on various out-of-town trips.
Goals for 2010:
* Sorry for making this an increasingly Boston-centric blog, but hey, for your own projects you start with what’s outside your front door too, right? Not that I actually have a front door.
Tagged animation, Boston, gps, map projects | 14 comments
Apparently in Maine they have a saying, “you can’t get there from here” (spoken in a Maine accent), said when giving directions as an observation of the impossibility of traveling a direct route between certain places. It seems to have something to do with lakes and the organization of roads in the vast rural areas of the state. To some extent it also holds true in other parts of New England.
I have been learning my way around the Boston area for some fifteen months now, and I do not wish to suggest that the challenge in an urban area measures up to what the good people of rural Maine face, but I think of the phrase often as I’m puzzled by how to drive between two points in town. Compared to most American cities, the street network here can be rather chaotic, and absurdly simple trips like driving across a street or around the corner can require a convoluted route and an intimate knowledge of the local streets. It’s just another good reason to leave the car at home.
Anyway, while spending some time dreading getting in the car to finish a bit of Christmas shopping, I was curious to see what some of these ridiculous routes look like on a map. Here are a few of the not-so-simple paths required for simple trips in and around Boston. Bits of intersecting streets are shown to illustrate that there’s no such thing as just going around the block.
Bring GPS.
Tagged Boston, driving, maine | 21 comments
Only twenty more miles to Cleveland, where OH MY GOD A TRICERATOPS IS FIGHTING A T-REX!
The compass rose or north arrow on a map is an easy place for a cartographer to leave his or her artistic mark on a map, in the GIS era usually to laughable effect. Or for a more corporate production, it’s a good place to stick a logo. In the days when American road travel was a bit more of an exciting adventure than it is now, gas stations distributed some heavily-branded highway maps encouraging travel powered by their fuel. As I browsed through a few of these in my possession (acquired from items discarded by the Arthur Robinson Map Library over a couple of years), this lovely north arrow from a c. 1937 Sinclair road map of Ohio stood out as particularly amusing.
I don’t think this was ever Sinclair Oil’s actual logo—rather, it’s long been the still-familiar green apatosaurus—but the company has associated itself with dinosaur imagery in general. The map, by the way, was made by Rand McNally.
Tagged dinosaurs, north arrow, old maps | 3 comments
By accidental I of course mean deliberate. Same deal as before. Tweak a map projection formula a bit, and the results can be interesting.
Made with indiemapper. We’ll probably return the map projection code to normal before it’s released.
Tagged indiemapper, math, projections | 3 comments
Time for a follow-up on a my short post about typographic maps nearly a year and a half ago. Maps made up of type are, as the kids say, the bee’s knees. As typography- and map-based designs are rather popular in general, more of these typography maps crop up every so often. Here’s another short list of some more maps I have encountered since writing last year.
This site has said “We’re launching soon” for two harvests now. I still don’t know what it is, but it’s kind of cool.
My earlier post mentioned Mark Andrew Webber and his linocut maps, but since then he’s worked on a large and amazing map of Paris, which you’ve probably seen by now. More like awesomecut.
One of my favorite maps from the poster session at this years NACIS conference was Mouths Wide Open by Mike Boruta of Ohio University, mapping Athens, Ohio with things overheard around town as well as his own thoughts. With his permission, here is a larger section of the map. Mike, it must be noted, was the winner of the NACIS student poster competition for a different map, The Million Dollar Highway.
Hand-lettering is not typography of course, but we can be liberal here. Layla Curtis has several drawings of maps that consist, essentially, of labels. I think they are traced. On her site, look for them under Work->Drawings.
Portsmouth Vernacular by Jodie Silsby is a fabulous map of Portsmouth (UK) with the streets written as local slang phrases. Maps + typography + language? Yes, please!
Here’s a series of maps at Very Small Array showing the US with each state filled in by the most common location mentioned in craigslist “missed connections” posts.
Finally, this is as much as I am willing to show of an unfinished project right now, but here’s a tiny preview of a map I have slowly been working on for a while. For now you’ll just have to take my word that everything besides white space in the image below is made up of type.
Tagged typography | 8 comments
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