Andy Woodruff  · Cartographer | Blog

General cartography

Calling all tutorials

1 August 2011 tagged cartographic perspectives, nacis, tutorials with 6 comments

Hello, internet. Are you doing mapping work with marvelous newfangled technology? Cartographic Perspectives (CP), the journal of NACIS, wants you! I am seeking how-to articles for a new regular section called On the Horizon, wherein cartographers can learn from one another about a variety innovative, new, or just plain useful implementations of current mapping technologies. […]

Web Cartography, or Putting Things on Top of Other Things

8 June 2011 tagged google maps, mashup, monty python, web cartography with 3 comments

Here is an inconsequential post of what’s on my mind at this moment. Remember red dot fever? That epidemic was back in the early days of web mapping APIs, when most of what was possible (and what was popular) was to throw a bunch of points on top of Google Maps and the like. Now […]

Apart from being dead, Art and Science are strong in web cartography.

20 April 2011 tagged art, rants, science with 4 comments

The other day Tim Wallace provoked a bit of Twitter conversation about the role of art in web cartography by way of a snarky, pessimistic Venn diagram on the subject; and having been forced into spelling out some of his thoughts in more detail, he has solicited some of us other nerds to write our […]

Revenge of the Valentine’s Day map

14 February 2011 tagged Boston, gps, place, valentines day with 8 comments

A year ago I fired off a quick post with a world map in the Werner projection, which of course we all know is heart-shaped and the ultimate expression of love. In the hopes of establishing a stupid annual tradition, I wanted to do another map this year, and after concluding that simply projecting or […]

This is a light brown dot

3 November 2010 tagged cart lab, icons, lakeshore nature preserve with Comments Off on This is a light brown dot

While sauntering down Memory Lane (i.e. file archives) this evening, I was amused by this presentation of several design alternatives for a bench icon on the University of Wisconsin Lakeshore Nature Preserve interactive map, so I thought I’d tell the internet. Light brown dot and badly drawn perspective aside, we were clearly going for a […]

City ≠ city

20 September 2010 tagged bing, cities, labels, rants, urban geography with 11 comments

City ≠ city. Place ≠ place. You know when you’re two thousand miles from home and somebody asks where you’re from and you just name the nearby major city even though you actually live in an adjacent suburb, because who the hell would know where that suburb is? I wish we’d think of cities that […]