Chicago letterpress: Two-color prints of the downtown area, with a light blue background on the lake and rivers and either blue or black ink for the text. An addition from the poster prints is the inclusion of the ‘L’ transit lines.

San Francisco letterpress (2nd edition): In either blue or black ink, this one features a waterline effect around the city.

Manhattan letterpress: Two sections, upper and lower Manhattan. Available individually or as a set; with careful cutting you could splice them together and everything will properly line up.

Madison, Wisconsin: The old Axis Maps stomping grounds and home of our graduate institution, the University of Wisconsin. This one is a regular offset print and covers the isthmus and university areas.

Besides those we’ve got our old standard posters: Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

So there it is. Get in any orders by this Friday to ensure delivery by Christmas!

I came back to it for the above map, which was done as a feature in the Ideas section of this past Sunday’s Boston Globe. I’d post a link, but after a day or so external links are redirected to some stupid archived text-only version. It’s the second newspaper map to come from the Bostonography blog that Tim Wallace and I write. (See Tim’s Radio Rivalry map.) That’s enough plugging, and I’ll leave the map interpretation talk for my post on Bostonography. Instead let’s get nerdy here.

To recap, the idea in a nutshell is to map the dominant colors of Flickr photos located in places across the map. I had hoped to come up with better ways of doing this than last time, but although I got a bit smarter about the data collection, the overall methods didn’t change much. I’m very interested in any ideas for this sort of map (you know, for when I do it again in 2013), so allow me to explain what I did and where some questions lie, in two stages.

Finding dominant colors

This is tricky, and I have yet to track down easy solutions. There are two obvious tracks at first:

• Calculate the average color by going over every pixel to come up with average red, green, and blue values, then combining the average of those channels to get the result. I tried this in 2009 when I was young and naïve, and quickly learned that the average color of an ordinary photograph almost always turns out to be something slightly brown, dull, and unsaturated. Unless the photo is almost entirely one color, the average color is not representative of the photo.
• Find the most common color of a photograph, which is even easier. This is usually a little better but still isn’t great. The most common color is often not the one that sticks out; rather it’s probably something dark and shadowy. Below is a comparison of this and the previous method, in an example from the old blog post.

In the original maps, as you can see above, I ended up deciding to discard all saturation and brightness information and only look at color hue. It was the best way I found to get something that was sort of representative but wasn’t consistently dull and dark. The drawbacks are that colors are exaggerated and it misses out entirely on something like a white, snowy scene. In the old maps I calculated the average color and then mapped its hue at full saturation and brightness. In the new map I looked only at hue to begin with and went with the mode, calculating the most common hue for a given photo or location. I took it a step further by ignoring any especially light or dark and unsaturated pixels.

There have got to be better ways to do this! Any wisdom, internet?

Displaying colors on a map

Last time I simply plotted each photo on the map as a colored point, then “blurred the crap out of it” to get something surface-like. It was quick and dirty, not accounting for overlapping points that obscure one another and excessively interpolating areas on the map. This time I kept it a little more accurate by doing everything based on a grid. For each grid cell I found the most common hue of pixels in photos contained in the cell. Each dot represents one of those cells. I show circles rather than solid squares because, well, it ended up looking a lot nicer. So there’s no interpolation this time, only generalizations due to aggregation. And I think I prefer the results aesthetically.

I’d love to find a clever way to do two things here:

• Show proportions of many colors, not just the one most common color. The supposed dominant color is interesting, but it isn’t the whole story of the colors of the photo-landscape. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg did this brilliantly with Flickr Flow, but that can’t show any spatial variation. Is there a way to apply that concept to a map?
• Show temporal variation, something also covered by Viégas and Wattenberg. Assuming that many photos are taken outdoors, predominant colors are going to change over the course of a year in a place like Boston which has four distinct seasons. There are some obvious answers to this challenge, but it would be great to come up with something novel and interesting.

The conceptually easy answer to both of those is interactivity, although it would mean a lot of data and/or on-the-fly number crunching. But I don’t know… sometimes interactivity feels like the easy way out. Hit me with some ingenious ideas!

(This is pretty much cross-posted from the Axis Maps blog.)

Just a quick promotional note in case I still have a remaining shred of dignity: a couple of weeks ago the fellas and I at Axis Maps launched a new store with two new typographic city maps. The Washington, DC map depicts most of the District with some surrounding areas, and the New York City map shows the whole of Manhattan as well as sections of adjacent boroughs and New Jersey cities. We’ve set up our own operation now and are stocked with offset prints, having graduated from Zazzle.

For a brief period there was also a limited edition letterpress print of San Francisco. It sold out in a few hours, much to our delight, but we’re currently thinking about future letterpress runs of this and other cities.

So in summary: now available are new typographic maps of New York and Washington, and all the rest (San Francisco, Chicago color and black & white, and Boston).

Let’s cut to the chase. I traveled a path around town in the shape of a heart as best I could. It was 10.44 miles (that’s 9,872 smoots in the local system of measurement), and the reason it’s awesome is that part of it was on a boat. The GPS track became this sickly shape—not exactly an ideal heart but vaguely recognizable as one. Or at least some kind of pointy muffin. [Google Maps link]

This is my first foray into GPS drawing, and I certainly don’t expect to reach, say, Jeremy Wood‘s level of mastery of the art. But it’s not so much about the art; while this is indeed an attempt at a silly Valentine’s Day map, it is also an exercise in what has been my Cartographic Purpose lately. More and more what interests me is the idea of maps as drivers of activity in physical spaces, particularly as it relates to exploration and discovery in cities as well as personal construction of place and mental maps. My zombie and personal mapping posts touch on this—the map represents in its ordinary capacity the real world but in another capacity a fairly abstract, meaningless space that is acted upon in the real world. So I am driven toward or away from a place not because of what is actually there, but because in some virtual space it contains a zombie or because it is a blank spot on a map of lines or because it happens to be within a heart shape on a street map; and then I discover what is there. Some day when I collect my thoughts and do some more background research I’ll write more about this practice. For now suffice it to say that I am fascinated by this method of discovering and creating place.

For the actual report on this heart excursion you can check out my Bostonography blog post, as they are probably too Boston-specific to address in any detail here. Except this one. Yes sir, mister billboard!

(As long as I’m tying all this into older posts, remember that city boundaries are stupid. This liquor store is in a border zone and I am really not sure which city it’s in. Could easily find out, but now I refuse to.)

A number of year-end retrospective blog posts in map-related fields have appeared in the last week or so, and it’s been interesting to take stock of all the excellent work people did during 2010. I of course didn’t do anything worth mentioning; I just went places and mapped it all.

Like I did last year, I have collected all my travels within the immediate local area (Boston) into a series of maps categorized by the mode of transportation for each trip. These are not GPS tracks; I remain low-tech and manually record each trip on a map. Any given segment has a line drawn once per day per mode of transportation. So, for example, if I walked one direction along a street and then later returned on the same street, I recorded only one line there for the day; but if I walked down the street and then returned on the subway running underneath the street, I recorded two lines. So the following neon map that ostensibly uses color intensity to show frequency of travel (blue = less, yellow = more) is really more of a compiled daily log than an accurate record of my presence at every location.

Maps for the various modes of transportation are in a small Flickr set. Those are foot, car, train, bike, and bus. No animation this time; that’s too much work.

As usual there is no real purpose to this hobby, but it is an interesting exercise in personal geography. For me, relatively little movement around the city is governed by routine because I work at home. I had a once-a-week job during the fall and had my usual grocery stores and such, but otherwise it’s almost all personal choices. I can look at the map and ask myself why I went where I did or why I didn’t go to the empty spaces on the map. I can identify the paths that indicate patterns in my life where I thought there were none. And of course I can look for signs of things like Kevin Lynch-style mental mapping concepts.

The most valuable thing about this habit, though, is not the post-mapping analysis but rather the motivation it generates to get out and explore and get to know new parts of the city. I’m sure you can imagine the thrill of getting to draw a line on a new part of the map. Doing all this without GPS keeps my mind sharp, too, because I must always be aware of exactly where I am so that I can later mark it on the map. My local expertise in transportation and geography is skyrocketing because of this little project. I highly recommend that everyone live cartographically!

Resolution for 2011: ride a boat.

We at Axis Maps are presenting a couple of typographic maps—that is, maps made entirely of typography—that we’ve slowly been working on for a while. One is a map of the central Boston area, and the other (other two, actually) is a map of central Chicago. Let me mention now, because I am a greedy, greedy person, that prints of each are available for purchase. See more detailed images and information at http://typographic.axismaps.com.

A few people out there may remember that I dig typographic maps, having written two posts on the topic in the past (one | two). In fact, the first of those was my first blog post, apart from the obligatory “OMG WTF I have a blog now LOL” post. This project has its origin in the map I presented there. Having been tasked with producing a small flier for a party during a geography conference in Boston, I produced a typographic map showing the way from the conference venue to the party venue. About five months later I found myself living in the Boston area, and not long after that I decided it would be fun to expand the idea to a larger part of the city.

I presented my progress (above) to my Axis Maps partners a few weeks later. Ben Sheesley and Mark Harrower liked the idea enough to establish a version for Chicago, a city to which they’re both attached in one way or another. Ben led the charge on that one, and we both picked at our respective maps for well over a year and half, until finally with a tear we launched them into the wild today.

Our maps don’t quite have the same flair that you might see in other typography maps; instead, with the exception of a couple of things like Ben’s Lake Michigan pattern, we have a fairly conservative, systematically detailed style that amounts to a nice reference map. But one that’s made of type.

We have both spent a ton of time on these maps, which, given that they are done digitally, instills a new respect for hand-made efforts. Nearly every line of text in these maps was laid out manually. And after that, nearly every line was edited manually to create effects such as the appearance of woven streets. It was all done in Illustrator, beginning with images from OpenStreetMap. We traced streets, filled in areas like water and parks, and then revisited every detail. In this process I think we’ve learned a few things that will help us generate maps of some other cities without taking two years to do it.

I can’t speak to Ben’s maps as much, but most of the Boston map is based on OpenStreetMap, that is, the road hierarchy, names, and locations of parks large enough to show up. It uses two typefaces (is that the right word?), News Gothic and Gentium, not chosen for any particular reasons but because they seemed to look okay. There are four levels of streets, a single style for each of water and parks, and a background “fill” of neighborhood names in 5 point type using a four-color scheme. The only real cheating is the occasional use of bullets to fill in white space that is too small for letters. Ben’s approach was pretty similar, using Myriad Pro and Cambria. There are styles for three levels of streets, major parks, areas of interest, and water. The black and white version of Chicago isn’t simply a desaturated version of the color map, but rather employs style that end up emphasizing water features over roads, somewhat the opposite of the color map. Where colors distinguish neighborhoods from one another in the other version (and the Boston map), black and white Chicago relies on different orientations of text.

A few Boston people may find their way to this post, so let me confirm that no, mine is not a map of Boston city proper. The city has too strange a shape (consider the Allston-Brighton appendage or disconnected Charlestown and East Boston) and extends too far from downtown to make it feasible for this level of detail. Plus I have to stand up for my side of the river as well as my principles of city definition: some places outside the city are more “city” than some places inside the city. And the Mystic River to the north just looks more interesting than additional land to the south. So apologies if you live in West Roxbury and are disappointed that your house isn’t on this map entitled “Boston,” but sacrifices had to be made. Let me also make a disclaimer about neighborhood boundaries within the city proper. No two sources seem to agree on a lot of these boundaries, so in uncertain areas I have drawn the line somewhere in the middle. They can be equally disagreed upon by all, at least.

BRB, waiting on the stoop for UPS to arrive with my typographic map posters.

(P.S. – Next stops, San Francisco, New York, and Washginton, D.C. Stay tuned!)

The other day Axis Mapper Dave was working with styled maps in the Google Maps API and made a brief styling mistake—all the small roads disappeared but their one-way arrows remained.

It was actually kind of an interesting perspective on the street system, a stripped-down view of engineered traffic patterns or perhaps a measure of the confusion facing unseasoned motorists. Sure enough that same evening saw me driving in circles because of one-way streets in a place where I’d ordinarily be on foot. And in Madison, Wisconsin, pictured above, in spite of the relatively few arrows on the map it can be surprisingly complicated to cross the isthmus if you don’t start from the right spot. Anyway, with these thoughts in mind naturally I stole Dave’s styling code and tried to blank out everything else to leave nothing but arrows from one-way streets.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem possible to do this completely with the Google Maps style options, and my samples below involved a little editing to remove yellow streets. I couldn’t figure out a way to make the “arterial” category of streets white without also turning their arrows white. Cloudmade‘s style editor, meanwhile, can do that but can’t yet remove street labels. This bare-bones map is the best I could do with Google Maps; the arterial streets are just turned off entirely, leaving a mostly white-and-arrows map at the largest scales.

Whereas I have previously tried to make a map into a musical instrument, I picture these maps as dance steps. It looks easy to do the Brooklyn, but it’d take some skill to dance the Paris. I’m not about to try it myself, but when geography-based dancing sweeps the nation, I demand royalties!

Pictured at top: dance steps in the sidewalk on Broadway in Seattle, by Flickr user DrewToYou.

City skylines are one of my favorite types of scenic view. When planning to visit a new city, or even when looking to take some photos of a familiar city, I like to do some online scouting of good spots for a skyline view. I can recall several years ago browsing Google Earth, panning around and tilting the view to see terrain and guess at good vantage points. But by now Flickr users probably have just about every vantage point covered, so a more fruitful search can be done by looking at geotagged photos.

Out of curiosity I threw together some maps to show where most of the skyline views are, as defined by photos tagged “skyline” on Flickr. They are done in a sort of heat map style where brighter red and yellow indicates a higher density of photos, but they are neither real heat maps nor real density surfaces; rather they are many overlapping, mostly transparent dots, blurred a bit and mapped to a heat-like color gradient. There are no great insights that you can’t get from searching Flickr’s own maps, but it’s not bad for purposes like mine. I even learned of a new spot to check out locally; so it totally worked!

Here are some of the most photographed cities in North America, according to these guys. I did skip a few, but they tended to lack enough “skyline” tags to make for an interesting map.

New York: The brightest lights here are observation decks (the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center), where one can view the skyline from the sky’s perspective. New York has such an abundance of skyscrapers that it’s difficult to take in the whole skyline at once from the ground, but that’s no reason not to see the views that people are favoring along the East and Hudson Rivers.

San Francisco: This city is made for scenic urban vistas. I recognize Coit Tower and Alactraz here, and can see that Treasure Island affords a nice view, but there are also some concentrations closer to the center of the peninsula that are beyond my knowledge of the city.

Chicago: All things considered, Chicago gets my vote as the best skyline in the country. There are several predicable popular spots here, such as the Museum Campus, the Sears Tower (or whatever it’s called now), and the John Hancock Center. But most interesting is the hotspot on Millennium Park, and specifically on the Cloud Gate sculpture, a.k.a. “The Bean.” This is presumably one of the only spots among any of these cities where the majority of skyline photos are of a reflection.

Seattle: Seattle gives San Francisco a run for its money in terms of ideal scenic geography, with lots of hills and coastline. Head to Gas Works Park, the Space Needle, Queen Anne Hill, or, um, that area along the water to the southwest whose name I don’t know. Interesting to note here, as well as in San Francisco, are series of photos that follow ferry routes.

Boston: It’s a difficult skyline, with the two tallest landmark skyscrapers being in an otherwise smaller section separate from the main downtown skyline. Nevertheless there are views to be had. The Prudential tower and the Longfellow Bridge stand out the most here, the latter probably because its panoramic view is so often seen from subway trains coming up for air as they cross the river. Looks like people aren’t fully appreciating the glory of the BU Bridge, though.

Toronto: Toronto’s skyline has the privilege of being visible at great distances across Lake Ontario. Locally, though, the CN Tower is brighter than anything else on this map, but there are also some notable spots along the water’s edge in various locations. Of all the cities here Toronto is probably the least familiar to me; perhaps some readers can identify locations on this map.

Vancouver: My recollection is that Vancouver’s skyline is expansive but not terribly distinctive. But like the other west coast cities, its topography and coastline provide vantage points. The brightest points on the map are actually on land near the downtown area, but views across various water features prevail overall. I know the Stanley Park views and a couple of those to the west, but am otherwise unfamiliar.

Philadelphia: Of course the favored view is the one from the art museum, and of course all those photos are of somebody doing a Rocky impression.

Geometry riddle: When is a square not a square?
Answer: When it’s in New England.

Above (click for greater bigness) with the stupid title is a series of minimal street maps I traced to show the varied actual shapes of a selection of so-called “squares” in the central Boston area. Urban spaces come in all shapes, as you can discover with this nifty tool, and a city square in any part of the world is by no means guaranteed to be a literal square, but New England’s style of square is peculiar (at least in this country) in its especially confused geometry. Unlike many places where a square is most often defined by a public open space or civic structure, here a square is typically defined by an intersection of two or more—usually closer to 4 gazillion—thoroughfares and/or other streets. The square’s name further applies to a business district around that intersection, and sometimes to an entire neighborhood. Thus the squares strongly define much of the local geography and organization of Boston and its close surroundings, as you can see in the diagrammatic Unmapped Boston poster. They are many things, but rarely are they square. You’ll also find some Circles and Corners around town, but they tend to be a bit more true to their names.

Any locals out there can probably find fault with my selection here or with the extent of the individual square maps, but I’ve tried to capture the central intersections of many of the major players. The collection can always grow! Entertain yourself by trying to identify each square before consulting the list under the title. (Squares from Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline are included.)

To everyone else: Sorry, I know you don’t care. But this city is just so mappable! (And in a way, undermapped.) You should come visit.

Previously: Squares can also be difficult to drive through, and they make good logos.

Edit: don’t hate me for this, but I’m in experimental stages of posting junk like this for sale at Zazzle, just in case anybody takes pride enough in their squares to put this on a t-shirt or poster. Something more professional and less desperate-looking will occur over time!