Jul 29
“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.
Posted in: General, Maps.
Tagged: Maps
Oct 22
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/
Posted in: Maps.
Jun 25
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.
Posted in: Design, Maps.
May 29
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.
Posted in: Maps.
Mar 23
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.
Posted in: Art.
Mar 02
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
Posted in: Maps, Wilderness.
Feb 25
Pocket Virtual Worlds: “The technology, a result of a partnership between Case Western Reserve and Bowling Green, uses a mobile device to explore photograph-based virtual worlds. There’s no GPS, nor Wi-Fi used, as I understand it, for the navigation of the worlds. It’s not clear how the datasets are knit together. Even if I don’t quite follow how it works, the New Media Consortium identified it as one of six emerging technologies in its 2008 Horizon Report. The end use?
This three-dimensional photographic virtual world is likely to be introduced to higher education and specific organizations within the next five years.
- Pocket Virtual Worlds website (flash demo available)
- The BG News“
(Via All Points Blog.)
Posted in: VRlog.
Jan 21
Creating Panoramic Images in Photoshop CS3 using Auto-align Layers
The Auto-Align Layers feature is a great new feature that will make assembling your panoramic pictures a breeze
via Creative Mac
Posted in: VRlog.
Dec 28
December was art month at the Art of Geography. A two foot square mounted print of Hydromancy at the antipodes of Elysium sold at a gallery, and another painting was selected by a magazine to use on their cover. I will post the details of the magazine issue as soon as it comes out.
Posted in: Art.
Nov 10
New non-destructive image editor: Naked Light: “Naked Light, a unique new image editor, offers a simplistic interface as well as advanced features; Naked Light will allow users to take advantage of non-destructive image editing. The application is advertised as re-inventing how image editing works, featuring node-based compositing and live filters, as well as a concept called ‘Infinite Resolution…
Requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
(Via The Macintosh News Network.)
Posted in: Macintosh, VRlog.
Nov 07
“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
Continue reading →
Posted in: Macintosh, Maps.