the Art of Geography weblog

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/

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.

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

“Are you wondering what the photo georeferencing “feature” in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is like? Find a photo that has latitude and longitude already encoded in its EXIF metadata. Open it with the Preview Application, turn on the inspector, and voila, under the “More Info” tab you get the metadata above a small world map:”

http://www.ogleearth.com/2007/11/how_geosavvy_is.html
(more…)

Microsoft Virtual Earth adds Birds-Eye View to 3D Globe: “

We all somewhat guess this would be coming around and tonight Microsoft releases Birds-eye View for their 3D Globe. They’ve taken those great Birds-eye View images from the 2D maps and using Photosynth they stiched them all together to create a ‘3D World’. Now of course this isn’t a true 3D, but if you’ve ever tried out Photosynth, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The Virtual Earth Blog spells it out quite nicely.

For background, its important to understand the challenges of visualizing our Birds eye imagery in a seamless mosaic the way we are all used to looking at satellite imagery that looks straight down at earth. Since all of the images are shot from the same point of view, it’s relatively easy to stitch them together in a convincing tapestry. There’s still challenges like doing good color balancing across images and rectifying so that buildings in tall cities don’t appear to butt heads, but these are pretty well understood problems. Birds eye images are a different story. because of the way they are captured, there is no easy way to stitch them at their edges without introducing nasty distortions. The result is that Birds eye imagery is viewed as discrete ’scenes’ instead of 1 giant tapestry. when you navigate to the edge of the current scene, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined, then displayed. Since Birds eye imagery is captured from 4 angles, we have North, South, East and west views of each point on earth adding another dimension of complexity to navigation.

In 3D, the same challenges remain, but are easier to address with client side managed code. the result is a user interface that borrows concepts from MSR’s Photosysnth to allow you to navigate more fluidly and naturally than what is possible with a javascript based client.

…

The street level images are nice from a navigating sense, but I always feel like I’m in a canyon. These Birds-eye view images are much more open and having them available in 2D or 3D really pushes Virtual Earth ahead of Google Maps in my book (now how about making the darn think work in Safari?). One thing that jumped out at me was how good Microsoft’s building models look. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the Birds-eye and the 3D model. For those who can’t install the 3D add on, take a look at the video below.

(Via Spatially Adjusted with James Fee.)

John Krygier wrote “I sat down one day and made a list of Tufteisms from the book” … leading to “20 Tufteisms from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”
which he then distills down to six commandments.

As someone who has three of Tufte’s books, this is quite interesting. Another aspect I liked in the books was the frequent use of some fine (and a few bad) maps as examples of points in the text.

In my last post, I mentioned how there was one prototype of the glass San Francisco map that used the typeface Klavika, and while it wasn’t chosen for the final product, I was very curious how it would work for a city map. Well the answer can be seen in the Portland map series project — an architecture of location for Portland culture and business which covers some of the major districts of the city, including the Pearl, Northwest/Nob Hill, and Downtown.

Downtown Portland
The Pearl
Northwest/Nob Hill & the Pearl

While these maps may seem detailed, there is also a comprehensive map which stitches all those together and is even more detailed, as this small snippet shows:

This super-sized map is not online as I am reserving it for paying customers. The average person couldn’t even print it at home anyway, as it takes a printer that can handle paper that is 36 inches wide by 48 inches tall. The map is well suited for use as a wall poster in a hotel, visitor center, gallery or building lobby.

Some of the features of this map series include:

1. Each type of establishment has a unique, iconic shape and color
2. Business locations are super easy to find using block numbers
3. Specific places are identified by a unique acronym, reducing confusion
4. An index lists all establishments in a district alphabetically within a category
5. First Thursday participants are emphasized using an orange outline–so it’s easy to spot them on the map and in the index.
6. Public art is identified, as are parks, mass transit, and parking.
7. The street grid is accurately shown, so walkers won’t be surprised by the distances between locations.

Any given icon and its associated label/acronym is unique throughout the system. This requires a namespace large enough to accommodate quite a few establishments. Each district has its own range of block numbers.

All in all, I really like Klavika for a city map such as this. Would I use it for a map of Seattle, LA or San Jose? I’m not sure… at some scale of city, the lack of a condensed version of the typeface would be felt more keenly.

I meant to announce this some time ago when it was unveiled. I’ve gotten quite a few queries regarding aspects of this map, so I’m posting some more info about it.

From across the lobby of the San Francisco Business District Hilton, the map looks like it is one giant sheet of glass, twelve feet wide by six feet tall. Diffuse backlighting illuminates the grid of streets and neighborhoods and color coded tourist attractions. The result is an informational display which attains a level of elegance and beauty rarely seen in commercial interiors.

The architecture firm Gensler did the design for the renovation of this landmark hotel across from the TransAmerica tower. Pulp Studio in LA took the digital files I designed and fabricated them into this amazing display, along with Hayward Glass. Cahill Contractors coordinated the integration of the many different groups working together.

Making the map took months of non-stop effort. I gathered every bit of information on the city that I could find. Three different stylistic treatments were created for the customer to choose from. We had meetings in the under-construction hotel to reach a consensus on map size, extent, style, features, and many other factors. The architect’s renderings were discussed. Many geo-spatial datasets were downloaded. Finally the map design was developed in Adobe Illustrator, sweating the details of every city block, park and pier in San Francisco. Many proof prints were made, which were a bit unwieldy as they were life-size or near life-size. The final file had to be split into three sections to match the panels that would be printed by Pulp Studios.

For more photos of this map, see the Art of Geography Cartography pages. The hotel showcases the map on their website in the interior section.

How is the map physically made? It is actually three panels printed on thin plastic sheets and sandwiched between two layers of glass, and backlit with diffuse lighting. The glass panels are held in place by a super-strong metal framework. The panels are so seamlessly joined that you have to be very close to be able to notice them (in the above close-up photo you can see a slight shadow off to the side where there is a seam. However when you are looking at it straight on, it is much less visible).

Glass is an ideal surface for an environment like this which receives a lot of wear and tear from people pointing to places on the map. At the end of the day, the only thing necessary to restore the map to like new condition is a wipe with a cloth.

There is some slight bowing of straight lines (distortion) in the above photos due to using a wide-angle lens for these shots.

The final style treatment used Futura as the typeface. To see the kind of work that went into preparing alternative treatments, here is the mock-up of a section of the map using Klavika and a different color palette where landmark buildings are orange, and shopping districts purple:

One of the key decisions was how much of the city to show. While it would have been great to show the entire city limits, the bottom edge ended up cropping the city just below the Mission. The form factor was guided by the fact that the top of the map needed to be no higher than about six feet tall. Other factors included where the critical mass of attractions were, and a block size such that individual buildings could be highlighted and named. I think a reasonable balance was chosen. Another design challenge was the longevity of the map — we wanted as much of the map as possible to remain viable over at least ten years. That meant shifting the focus somewhat from a printed map which might be updated every other year.

Nikolas Schiller: Schiller barely pauses on the way to his computer, which he fires up to reveal hundreds of his map creations. They are places you know — the Mall, Adams Morgan, Georgetown, plus other U.S. cities and war-torn ones abroad. But the streetscapes — photographed from above at a resolution fine enough to just make out cars and people — have been warped and woven into kaleidoscopic mosaics, arabesques, spheres. “

(Via The Map Room.)

Flash Earth is an interesting variation on Google Maps and Google Earth. You can flip between eight different aerial photography and satellite views of the earth with the click of a button. Some of the views are not that different; two of them are Microsoft Virtual Earth, one with labels on, one with labels off. Even some of the competing services don’t look that different for some locales; perhaps they both acquire the photos from the same data source.

Flood Map Modernization Elevations Inadequate; New Map Using Lidar Proposed: “

The Flood Map Modernization program currently being undertaken by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has inadequate elevation information to map the shape of the land surface in three dimensions, a committee of the National Research Council reported. Such information is critical in determining the likely direction, velocity, and depth of flood flows. The committee found that most of the publicly available elevation data for the U.S. is more than 35 years old.

The committee called for a new elevation mapping program, which it named Elevation for the Nation. This new mapping program should employ light detection and ranging (Lidar) to acquire elevation data it was recommended.

Photo courtesy FEMA.


“

(Via GeoCarta.)