The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) holds a marvelous annual conference, and this year’s was in Tacoma, Washington just 90 minutes down the road from my house. I gave a talk on the techniques I use to draw mountain topography with colored pencils. The first few minutes give a little background of my PNW
By the time you are reading this, my colleague John Nelson and I will have presented to a bunch of fantastic creatives at Adobe MAX 2019 about making maps as designers. Designers make gorgeous maps, because oftentimes they don’t confine themselves to super strict ideas of what a map should look like. Plus, well… they’re
Making maps is fun. As a cartographer, I’m biased to feel this way. Still, when I tell people that map-making is my career, a lot of people respond with “I love maps!” so I am not alone in realizing maps’ awesomeness. At the upcoming Adobe MAX 2019 conference I will be presenting alongside my colleague
It is October 2019, and time to begin a new website. You’re here when this page is brand new! Super fresh (‘fresh’ sounds more exciting than under development’). I’m excited about it. Next week, I will be posting a tutorial for steps to draw hand-drawn hillshade maps with colored pencils, and I wanted to get
Typography for Topography: BellTopo Sans Typeface & Free Font
In 2018, I made a few maps that were inspired by the design of the earliest USGS Topos. I had a lot of fun doing it too. I tried to pick areas with large bodies of water, since the concentric shorelines that were popular in maps from the 1800s & early 1900s are super enjoyable
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