the Art of Geography blog » General

An updated Forest Park map will be available as a poster print

erik — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:14:03 +0000

The exact date is not clear yet, but I’m guessing it will be available around the end of summer 2010. It’s too early to nail down pricing, but since you will get a real physical product to hang on your wall, it will have to cover the cost of making it.

The map has been updated in many ways

Many thousands of tiny changes made: the map is currently at version 732; the one last posted on Art of Geography was version 618. Each increment to the version number represents a bundle of edits to the map. There’s too many changes to describe in one post, so I’ll be describing some of the improvements over the next few months. I expect more refinements to occur before it heads to official release.

To date there’s only been a few copies of the map in poster format given to friends and fellow map-makers. Even then they were not true one sheet prints; multiple sheets of super-B size paper were carefully spliced together to form the appearance of one sheet. As someone who as a child was excited to unfold those large National Geographic map inserts, I’m really thrilled at the prospect of this map being available as a large poster print. To me, there’s something very compelling about seeing Portland’s Forest Park take up an appreciable extent of a wall.

As the actual date draws nearer I expect to post more details about pricing and the actual size. I’m anticipating using a print-on-demand service such as ImageKind or other service which can handle the unusual print size, handle orders, and ship directly to customers rather than the Art of Geography having to stock inventory. If you have experience selling maps this way, I’m certainly interested in hearing how it has gone for you.

shone: the cratonic milieu of Aeolia

erik — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 02:09:33 +0000

maplesprang 30

erik — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:33:14 +0000

Experimenting with StudioArtist 4, Photoshop CS4.

Metro’s Walk There! guide maps wins top international awards

erik — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:45:48 +0000

“Metro’s ever-popular Walk There! guide recently won several international awards at the annual Environment Systems Research Institute International User Conference held earlier this month in San Diego. The guide’s maps to great places to walk around the Portland-Vancouver area took home two top prizes, including a best overall win.

The ESRI International User Conference, the world’s largest event dedicated to geographic information system (GIS) technology, is a weeklong gathering that draws thousands of GIS software users, working in diverse industries, from across the globe. More than 12,000 people attended this year’s conference. Each year the conference includes a Poster Gallery, a large football field-sized room filled with nearly 2000 posters competing in 16 categories.

Walk There! was entered into the Best Cartographic Design: Map Series or Atlas – Press Copy category by Matthew Hampton, a senior transportation and planner, and Erik Goetze, a member of Metro’s creative services team. Eight maps from the guide were presented along with informational content about the Walk There! program. The maps took first place in this particular category and later went on to win best overall, beating out all other first-place finishers and prevailing over 2,000 entries.”

A story about this appeared in The Oregonian.

Forest Park map updated

erik — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:59:04 +0000

Panel #1, the southern-most of the 4 panel mapset has been updated thanks to feedback from users of the map. Thank you S.H., J.R., E.S., and others who wrote in.

http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/

Introducing Walk There! 50 treks in and around Portland and Vancouver

erik — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:14:55 +0000

From www.oregonmetro.gov

“Introducing Walk There! Metro’s new guide to great places to walk in the Portland-Vancouver area. The book will lead you on 50 explorations of newly acquired urban natural areas, scenic parks, historic neighborhoods and fascinating main streets. Detailed maps and route descriptions will help you discover the region’s rich history and varied landscapes while you enjoy the benefits of walking.

Walking is one of the easiest and most effective activities you can do to tighten your wallet and your waistline. If you drive less, you save more by avoiding the costs of gasoline and parking. Walking is one of the safest activities you can do to maintain your health. Mile for mile you burn as many calories walking as you would jogging, but with far less stress on your joints. Walking also helps the environment. You can reduce your carbon footprint by shifting short trips from your car to your feet.

Metro developed the new guide in partnership with local governments and community groups and with support from Kaiser Permanente. The book will be distributed through health education classes and community walking events and programs. The 50 walking route maps and descriptions are available in a pocket-sized book or for download…”

The culmination of a tremendous effort by a wide-ranging team, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to design the walking maps in this guide.

Art of Geography project: maps for Portland Forest Hikes: Twenty Close-In Wilderness Walks

erik — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:03:37 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the availability of a book by James Thayer titled “Portland Forest Hikes: Twenty Close-In Wilderness Walks”. Here are twenty wilderness hikes within twenty miles of downtown Portland, Oregon, less than a half hour’s ride from the city. Adventurers at all skill levels will be surprised by the remoteness and remarkable beauty of these easy woodland escapes. This pocket-sized companion includes maps, bus access, basic conditions, flora, fauna, and local history. Choose the shorter walks for kids or rugged routes for the ambitious. Half the trails explore lesser-known wooded hillsides in Forest Park. Others venture farther north into rarely described prime Oregon hiking country in the Tualatin Mountains for the thrill of the wild at the city’s back door.

Note that by providing a link (or if you buy the book) I get no additional income. I did enjoy checking these interesting trails out, and it was a pleasure working with Timber Press. This project was completed about a year ago.

Start! Walking America: The American Heart Association’s National Start! Walking Day Is today

erik — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:22:46 +0000

April 16 is the American Heart Association’s National Start! Walking Day. The call to action is simple: Americans should fit 30 minutes of walking into their workday.Studies reveal that American jobs have become more sedentary and that employees are working 164 more hours a year than they did 20 years ago. The Start! movement works with employers and the 142 million Americans in the workplace to create a culture of walking before, during or after work.”Incorporating walking into your daily routine is one of the easiest changes you can make. You can hop off the bus or subway a stop or two earlier; you can take the stairs at work or park farther away,” said American Heart Association President Dr. Daniel Jones. “There are lots of little ways to incorporate a few more steps, which can truly have life-changing results.”http://sev.prnewswire.com/health-care-hospitals/20080415/DC1953415042008-1.html

University of Arizona SBS Developments magazine uses Art of Geography painting

erik — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:20:08 +0000

Thank you to Lori Harwood and Christine Scheer for picking some Art of Geography art for the cover of their magazine, and reproducing the color/tonality so well.

Announcing the new Forest Park map

erik — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:37:30 +0000

Just in time for the first trillium blossoms of spring, the Forest Park map is ready for general use. This map went through several months of development and a couple months of beta testing. The current version of the map is v615 — if you have an older version, make sure to download the latest from
http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/. How can you tell what version you have? The version number is a small notation on the right side under the title of panel 4.

I can safely say this is the best map I’ve made to date (although there are maps in the pipeline which may top this). Every aspect of my park map approach has been refined, improved, and tested.

Some notes on the map:

The technique for arriving at more accurate trail paths using LiDAR is described in an article I wrote recently.

One of the challenges of the Forest Park map is that the park is very long and skinny, yet contains over 75 miles of trails (see image to right of the park as it would look in a single panel).

I went to great lengths to ensure that the map would be usable by someone with just an average letter-size color printer. By average I mean a color inkjet printer that sells for $50-$80 (printers in this class can print at over 750 dots per inch, which should be fine for these maps). In order to ensure this level of usability, the map was broken into four panels, each of which is designed to be readable on a letter-size piece of paper (21.4 cm x 28 cm for European readers). One side-effect of straining every facet of the map layout to meet this goal is that the title/scale/compass information is not positioned in the same place on every panel.

If you wanted to make the map pages more portable, you could use double-sided matte paper and print panels 1 and 3 on one sheet of paper, and panels 2 and 4 on the second (that way you can still overlap adjacent panels). If you have an Epson printer, I find that Epson’s heavyweight matte paper works very well for this map, and recommend printing (in the print dialog box) with the highest quality setting that is available for the paper you are using. Printing the maps in black and white won’t work very well–there’s too much information which is designed around color.

One goal of the map was to facilitate using public transit to access the park. So three MAX stops are shown, as are bus stops along the eastern edge of the park. The Trimet bus-stop (and stop IDs) are not shown for every single bus line in the map extent, as it would overwhelm the map with transit info, most of which would not be relevant.

If you want to link to the map, the permanent URL to use is not this weblog post but http://www.artofgeography.com/maps/fp/

–erik