The goal of this site is to assist practicing cartographers with the presentation of shaded relief and related raster art on maps.
Tag: mapping
Maps realism
This paper examines the techniques being developed by the US National Park Service (NPS) Division of Publications for designing plan (2D) maps with a faux realistic look. The NPS produces tourist maps for 385 parks in a system spanning a large swath of the Earth’s surface from the Caribbean to Alaska to the South Pacific, and which is visited by 300m people each year. Many park visitors are inexperienced map readers and non-English speakers. In our ongoing effort to make NPS maps accessible to everyone, the design of NPS maps over time has become less abstract and increasingly realistic, particularly in the depiction of mountainous terrain and natural landscapes. Many of the techniques discussed herein are borrowed from or inspired by 3D mapping. However, the scope of my paper deals exclusively with plan mapping—a format that has received scant attention in the digital era in regard to abstract vs. realistic depiction compared to the 3D world. It is also the format in which the majority of NPS maps will continue to be made.
how the visual design of NPS maps changed towards more realism while retaining their clarity. jummy infodesign.
Wide-angle satellite surveillance
Researchers have come up with a wide-angle camera that can image a 10km2 area from an altitude of 7.5km with a resolution better than 50cm per pixel.
UAV image processing
how to do DIY UAV image drones. i think within 5 years most interesting places will have real-time feeds.
Open Aerial Map
Open Aerial Map is a non-profit, open access, meeting place for the aerial imaging community. It exists to provide a freely available image map of the world created solely by community contribution, and to facilitate the free exchange of imagery, technology, and ideas. In order to provide an unrestricted, free, an unbiased view of the world, OpenAerialMap encourages the free exchange of aerial imagery, without restriction on its use.
that & gps data & lots of people = free maps for the world.
Map attention data
Hotmap shows where people have looked at when using Virtual Earth, the engine that powers Live Search Maps: the darker a point, the more times it has been downloaded. It is a pretty cool idea. The heat maps clearly focus on high population areas, roads, coastlines, rivers, country borders, and other items of interest.
interesting. we should do this with a site that has actual market share
breakfast topo
geekily awesome
Mapping on the Run
the accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the planet, requiring ever more frequent redrawing not only of political boundaries, but of the shape of Earth’s features themselves.
Energy shaming
The city council of Haringey in the UK hired a spy plane to fly overhead and identify which households are wasting the most energy — to try and shame them into turning their heat down
this is news? they did that in zurich in the early nineties. they need to do this kind of public shaming in the us, where houses are shoddily built and leaking like sieves.
The People’s 311
a public photo pool documenting non-emergency 311 conditions throughout New York City. dangling traffic signs, illegal advertising, dead or dying street trees
this would be nicer on a map that does not suck, but it’s a start.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 