Very Expensive Maps

Oregon lead cartographer and product manager Neil Allen talks atlas production with East View Geospatial’s Benchmark Maps, the years of mapmaking and months of ground-truthing required to create a Texas atlas, adventures in custom cartography (clients include the U.S. Coast Guard, The Cascadia Institute and an eccentric millionaire’s treasure hunt), the importance of asking the

Ontario explorer, mapmaker, and conservationist Hap Wilson on drawing 400 guide maps across 50 years, traveling more than 40,000 miles of Canadian wilderness by canoe, the one digital tool he likes (it’s Google Earth), saving lives by creating a map that, unlike the one it replaced, did not send tourists over a waterfall, retracing thousand-year-old trails to prevent their efface

Colorado painter, illustrator and mapmaker Erick Ingraham on solving art directors’ problems, making it interesting for himself (“I’m known to make things more complicated than they might need to be”), spending eight years painting the Rockies’ western slope, working from his own photographs, taking inspiration from the past, getting into the culture of what he’s mappin

London artist and mapmaker Stephen Walter on two decades of drawing and painting “the semiotic residues of humankind,” an invitation to map an Ivorian national park (and why you should wait for the dry season before attempting this), approaching six years of work on an NYC map, interpreting Michael Drayton’s 17th c. topographical poem Poly-Olbion into a 6x5 ft. folkloric tour

Manhattan writer and cartographer John Tauranac on his first maps of Midtown’s pedestrian passages, a public debate with Massimo Vignelli (“His geography was egregious”), working at a very different MTA (they used to have an aesthetics committee?), the “no improvements” made to the subway map since he chaired the 1979 MTA map committee, guiding Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s he

In early 2023 GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton saw a tweet about Andy Nosal’s search for someone to take over The Map Center, Nosal's map shop in Pawtucket, RI; six months later Middleton left California to move into one of the last map retail stores in the U.S. We discuss his goal of turning the shop into an inviting retail space and field trip destination, inci

Lyonnais illustrator and designer Lionel Portier on a mapmaking career that spans 30 years and five continents, accepting any map challenge an art director might conceive, a travel magazine gig that led to an Australian passport, painting 100 birds for a wetland park, his favorite territory to illustrate, spending three months on a 3x4-ft. map of Bruges, why he never carries a sket

Utah artist Isaac Dushku on how a map has to evoke either a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home, the best- and worst-selling states in his catalog (he drew all 50), taking his business Lord of Maps from being ghosted on Facebook Marketplace to supporting his family, creating a board book of America’s highest peaks with a “ridiculously complicated” printing process, why

Urbanist and illustrator Sam Usle on designing human-scale communities and rendering them in watercolors, why theme parks reflect a yearning for human-scale towns, redesigning part of his high school campus before graduation, why you can thank Le Corbusier for hideous Revit-default cities, the axonometric map that sold Disneyland, storytelling with facades, the history of Rome’s

Naomi Rosenberg, assistant director of the Media and Accessible Design Lab at San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind, discusses the art of making fingertip-readable maps: why clutter is the enemy of good tactile maps, the quest for an affordable embosser, being locked to 24 pt. type, creating large-scale accessible maps for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the OSM-filt