Listed here are some of the notable maps or map-related projects I have worked on. These include professional work as well as a few highlights from blogging and small side projects. See the "my maps" category on the blog for more maps by my hand.
indiemapper
Indiemapper is a web-based thematic cartography application under development by us at Axis Maps. It was originally conceived by Zach Johnson and I over two years ago while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, following Zach's initial experimentation with drawing and projecting shapefiles in Flash. Since then it's grown to become a very capable thematic mapping tool, and is a cheaper, easier way to make great-looking maps than most existing software. For more screenshots and such, have a look at my blog post about its release.
You Can't Get There From Here
This doesn't represent much in the way of design work, but was nevertheless mildly exciting because it was published with a short article in the Boston Globe in January 2010. The piece was adapted from a blog post featuring simplistic maps showcasing the occasionally extreme confusion and difficulty of driving from Point A to Point B in the Boston area.
Self-mapping
Since the beginning of 2009 I have kept track of everywhere I go (and by what mode of transportation) within the local Boston area and have recorded it on a map, but without the aid of GPS. Instead I diligently a keep mental note of where I am at all times. It's a personal project that forces me to be very geographically aware while also encouraging me to explore new places. 2009's tracks were compiled into a composite map for the year and a Flash animation.
Flickr as a paintbrush
This was an experiment using the Flickr API to retrieve geotagged photos and generate map views derived from the dominant colors in those photos. I only produced a few maps but hope to revisit this project eventually. The idea is to go beyond the systematic top-down view that an aerial photo provides and map the landscape based on what people in a place are seeing (or what they find interesting). Sometimes that corresponds to the colors you see from above, and sometimes it doesn't.
Ohio is a Piano
Little more than an amusing interactive map, but possibly construed as some sort of artistic statement, this musical map exploits the coincidence that the state of Ohio has the same number of counties as a standard piano has keys. Counties are mapped to piano notes according to demographic data. You can "play" the counties by brushing over the map, play a song or an ordered list of data and observe its geography, and play the sequence of notes in a route between two places. A minor hit with certain internet crowds.
2008 election map
Axis Mappers Mark Harrower, Dave Heyman, and I turned a concept of mine into a novel map of the 2008 U.S. presidental election. It was an attempt to avoid some of the drawbacks of the cartograms that are often used to show weighted election results, here modifying transparency instead of size. The concept was subsequently developed by Robert Roth, Zachary Johnson, and me into the "value-by-alpha" map, outlined in a forthcoming Cartographic Journal paper.
GeoCommons Maker!
Axis Maps worked with FortiusOne in 2008 to design and build the Flash interface to Maker!, a mapping tool for FortiusOne's GeoCommons, which allows users to access, store, and share geodata, and via Maker to quickly and easily create and share high-quality thematic mashups using any of thousands of data sets. My role was to program much of the front end interactivity and map rendering based on our designs. See my blog post for more information on what we hoped to accomplish with Maker.
Lakeshore Nature Preserve Map
The Lakeshore Nature Preserve map is part of a web promotion of the natural areas on UW-Madison's campus in 2006. The map contains a wealth of information about the Preserve's landscapes, providing tools for all types of visitors to explore the place. I worked with Rob Roth on the bulk of this map alongside Joel Przybylowski, web site designer Melanie McCalmont, and the direction of Professors William Cronon and Mark Harrower. The map won Best Interactive Map in the ACSM 2007 Design Competition.
UW Online Campus Map
The University of Wisconsin-Madison's online campus map was entirely rebuilt in 2005-2006 to become a fast and easy Flash front end to an impressive collection of campus information. Under its lead developer Aaron Erkenswick, I worked with Eve McGlynn and Jamon Van Den Hoek on the graphic design and interactivity, with direction from Nick Weaver and Professor Mark Harrower. After its completion, I was in charge of the map, making updates as needed and adding a handful of new features. This map was named Runner-up Interactive Map in the ACSM 2007 Design Competition.
UW Print Campus Map
The University of Wisconsin-Madison's printed campus map was redesigned in 2005 by some of my Cartography Lab predecessors. It's an award-winning map that has spawned a new cartographic identity for the campus and represents the best practices of the UW Cartography Lab. In the 2007-2008 academic year I was responsible for maintaining the map. I have made a series of edits and updates, and have also created several special versions of the map tailored to more specific purposes.
AAG Party Invitation
This map, made entirely of type, was a small flier I created to announce a party thrown in Boston by the University of Wisconsin Geography Department during the 2008 conference of the Association of American Geographers. The map shows the party / hotel locations, streets, walking routes, and subway stops / lines using nothing but varying typography. From a distance it may look like an ordinary map, but there's nothing here that isn't a typographic glyph.
AsthMap
AsthMap is a map and visualization interface for viewing asthma exacerbations over time and space as indicated by data sent from inhalers outfitted with GPS transmitters. The map is part of a study led by David Van Sickle in UW's Department of Population Health Sciences. It's done with Flash and ActionScript 3 and implements Modest Maps. I've worked alongside Zach Johnson, with initial contributions by Eve McGlynn and Rob Roth.
Hydrologic Dashboard
The Hydrologic Dashboard, a project for the UW Sea Grant Institute, maps and visualizes streamflow and precipitation data from USGS stations. I've worked on this project with Zach Johnson, who created the first version of the map using Modest Maps and his time series graph code. My primary contributions have been in bringing more data layers to the map, in particular layers from remote web map services.
CincinnatiRoads
CincinnatiRoads is a map interface to a collection of videos recorded while driving along streets in Cincinnati. It's meant as both a way to explore the city and a way to preserve images of the present city for the future. I completed this map for my final project in Mark Harrower's Animated and Web-Based Maps class at UW-Madison, in conjunction with Ethan Hahn, who originally came up with the idea and recorded all the videos. The map won first place in the 2006 NACIS Student Web Mapping Competition.
Cincinnati Subway
I designed this Cincinnati Subway map as my final project in Mark Harrower's Graphic Design in Cartography course at UW-Madison. It presents the history of Cincinnati's doomed attempt at constructing a rapid transit system nearly 100 years ago, an effort which leaves the city today with a section of abandoned subway tunnels. The map takes on the challenge of depicting a century of history in a single, static image by showing the rapid transit loop as four vertically-stacked layers, each representing a different period of its history.
Molokai shaded relief
This was just for fun: a map of the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i, made as an exercise in Photoshop shaded relief techniques. The map shows the terrain of the island as well as land cover categories. I applied some lessons from Tom Patterson's how-to articles on Photoshop shaded relief. Typography snobs, please forgive the use of the Papyrus typeface (or something that looks like it, anyway)! I have also taken a crack at rendering a similar map in ActionScript.