My Favorite Map Animation Workflow & Essential Resources
Discover 7 key tips for diving into After Effects as a mapmaker
Animated Flyover Map in ArcGIS Pro and Adobe After Effects
Building maps often requires multiple software applications. In fact, I cannot recall a map that I’ve made in the last decade that did not include using at least two different applications. For this map, I created a flyover animation in ArcGIS Pro. I then imported the animation (mp4) into Adobe After Effects, where I added…
Reimagining the John Snow Cholera Map with Animation
Last week marked Esri’s annual User Conference in San Diego, and what a conference it was! It’s always fun to see geospatial friends and meet new ones. Part of my time at this year’s gathering was spent presenting alongside Kenneth Field and John Nelson for our talk entitled “Designing Thematic Maps.” This year, Ken had…
A Glimpse of the USPS Landscape with Maps
By the time I publish this, I will have just finished presenting at the 40th annual North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) conference. NACIS is a large community of map enthusiasts who meet once a year to share and learn about cartography projects. This year’s conference is being held virtually due to the current pandemic crisis.…
The Font is Ready! BellTopo Sans Fonts Design Complete
About the BellTopo Sans Font I designed the BellTopo Sans font, originally inspired by the typefaces on the antique U.S.G.S. maps of the late 1800s and early 1900s. To read more about the inspiration for BellTopo Sans, read the first post I wrote about it when the font was in beta. The font has undergone…
Video is up! Colored Pencil Hillshade
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…
Adobe MAX 2019: Mapping
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…
Drawing Color Hillshade: A tutorial (with time lapse videos)
Last year I shared my technique for drawing hillshade with graphite (pencil). Since then, I have explored a few different methods for drawing color hillshade. I will be sharing one of those methods in this post. This method uses those graphite drawings as the base, or the starting point. So to get started, make sure…