Daniel Huffman
@pinakographos
An arboreal, poly, gender non-participant mapmaker. Portfolio & tutorials: somethingaboutmaps.com. Prints: You can support my art & teaching at
Symbols for settlements. I need to indicate which have harbors, airports, or ferry ports, so my current solution is to put colored-coded arcs around the dots. Hope this works, because we don't have a lot of space.
New on the blog: "On Sin," in which I meditate on cartographic ethics, and invite discussion on a thorny problem: how we might decide if or when the inaccuracies embedded in a #map cause it to become unethical.
Ok, I think the basemap is done for now. It's mostly meant as just a visually interesting background layer. As I begin to layer all of the vector data and labels atop it, I might adjust it (perhaps make it even lighter). We'll see what ends up happening.
More cartographic minutiae. The width of my river lines is a mismatch for some of the river mouths on my land polygons. So I'm going through and adjusting the river lines to make sure they all proceed through the river mouth.
A little Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop extends my tree cover layer beyond the coast, so that I don't need to worry about small misalignments and gaps between this layer and my actual coastline layer. And meanwhile, I'm working on picking colors for the land cover layers.
It's valuable to always have extra data, in case you need to shift your map window (the grey rectangle). However, in this case, I rather overdid it.
Other accomplishments today: 1. tapering all the rivers. I had QGIS segment the river ends so it was easy to apply a tapered stroke profile in Illustrator. 2. Working on shaded relief. Combining multiple reliefs to get one that works at multiple scales (inspired by @awoodruff.bsky.social).
Next up, I sieve the data: removing small patches that are below a certain size threshold. Then I polygonize it, and we're all done. It's still a bit detailed in some areas, but based on how I think I'll eventually depict it, that should be fine.
I rasterized it, then ran neighborhood statistics with a mode operator. This fills in the holes with a reasonable neighbor value. To avoid needlessly smoothing the non-hole areas, I keep all original non-hole values and add in the neighborhood data only in the holes.
One more data layer still needs some tidying. I've been given this very detailed layer of land ownership. I will use it for marking federal & state lands. Right now it's too detailed for my scale and has many holes for water (more water than I will be showing).
I have 30+ data layers, and now it's time to see about trying to fit them all legibly into one map.
Also I'm not sure what to call a separate small map that's at the same scale. Like, I'm making a poster of Alaska and I've cut off some of the Aleutians and moved them elsewhere on the page. But they're still at the same scale.
While revising an old SNES favorite, Aerobiz Supersonic, I noticed that the EU representative (here referred to as the European Communities due to the game's vintage) coincidentally looks rather like Ursula von der Leyen.
I heard today from someone that she encountered this piece of mine in a class! I had hoped it would circulate around, but I don't think I'd heard actual confirmation until now. somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2021/02/02/c...
I've been thinking about much of the same (and put it into a talk this week). People value human connection & human-made products. Think of the status we place on handmade furniture, and other crafted goods vs. those made cheaply in a factory. A trust & authenticity economy is forming.
There's room for that argument, but: I think authorship is not a binary. It's a continuum. If I throw shapefiles into QGIS and keep default styling, I "made" it, but my degree of authorship is very low, vs. if I spent hours styling everything how I want.
This reminds me very tangentially of a type of rock that I was given recently: Leland blue stone. They're beautiful slag from an iron smelter. leelanau.com/leland-blue-...
Last year, I designed ceramic #GreatLakes #map coasters for my brother, replacing his older (and inaccurate) ones. If you want some, send me a DM or email! They are $10/each, plus shipping cost. For now, I'm not listing them on my store page, just selling them here via word of mouth.
It appears, at least as far as my Etsy store goes, that consumers are cutting back.
At some point, when energy permits, I hope to do one of my occasional livestreams breaking down the construction of these maps and answering questions.
Earlier this year I got to play around with some Roman roads data for @sciam.bsky.social. The article (with four of my #maps) is out now: www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-...
A little #Mars hachure doodle, showing Olympus Mons and the Tharsis Montes.
I fiddled with this more and made a better (but still kinda quick and dirty) version. I posted it on the Maddison Reddit and … it did not go well. I guess it's nice that people have high standards? Anyway, I've learned not to share anything there that isn't polished and finalized!
NES repair. After about 40 years it was time to replace the 72-pin connector.
The Alliance of Freelance Cartographers needs your help! By taking our short annual survey, you strengthen your #cartography community. This survey is for anyone (globally) who did any amount of freelance mapping last year (even a little). forms.gle/Em7sULniXUMv... Please help spread this widely!
Always make sure to generalize your terrain to match your scale.
