Posts Tagged ‘minimal maps’

Geodancing

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 […]

Boston squared

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 […]

Footprints

In spite of everything that maps can do, the ones I enjoy most are the simplest of all, those that reveal geography by stripping away all but some particular phenomenon and showing little or nothing more than where it exists. It’s the challenge of interpretation, or the self-satisfaction of recognizing something, or the imagining of […]

You can’t get there from here

Apparently in Maine they have a saying, “you can’t get there from here” (spoken in a Maine accent), said when giving directions as an observation of the impossibility of traveling a direct route between certain places. It seems to have something to do with lakes and the organization of roads in the vast rural areas […]