
A Cartography Nerd's Guide to Custom Map-Making - dcschelt
https://www.ideo.com/blog/a-cartography-nerds-guide-to-custom-map-making
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twelvechairs
QGIS is an incredible success of the FOSS world.

Its probably mostly down to the ridiculous pricing demands of the other GIS
providers (primarly ESRI, but also MapInfo and others). But it gives hope for
us FOSS supporters.

Who knows - maybe one day the industry standard may shift from others like
Adobe CS also?

~~~
Waterluvian
QGIS is incredible. I have two geography degrees and all they taught us was
ESRI stuff. One class with GRASS and QGIS, 7 years of ArcGIS. Only when I
graduated and no longer had access to their insanely expensive licenses that I
rediscovered QGIS. Because it's not the smoothest ux, it really pushed me
towards the programmatic API. As a result I became a better GIS expert than I
ever would have. I do robotics + GIS these days and QGIS is front and centre
in my toolbox.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I don’t know if it progresses to the point of kickbacks often, but ESRI
heavily promotes their projects in education in order to lock students into
their ecosystem as early as possible.

~~~
eu
Just like Microsoft or Autodesk

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nxc18
For those who want to take a deep dive and learn about cartography, Esri has a
fantastic, free MOOC running at the moment and it's not too late to register.
It uses ArcGIS Pro ($$$) but you get a free license for the duration of the
course. Personal licenses are affordable after that if you want to keep going.

[http://www.esri.com/mooc](http://www.esri.com/mooc)

Full disclosure: I work at Esri. I'm new to cartography myself, and I've been
promoting the MOOC internally because it really is awesome (in my humble
opinion).

~~~
fantispug
How hard would it be to follow the course using QGIS? Is it about the
principles, or specific ArcGIS features? I haven't found as good courses in
QGIS, but I have no interest in learning ArcGIS

~~~
nxc18
Probably pretty hard, unfortunately. The course teaches cartographic
principles, but it does so using ArcGIS pro.

You could try doing the activity in Pro and QGIS in parallel; that way you'd
learn both.

That being said, I'm a very hands-on learner so I get the most benefit from
the activities; you may find the videos/quizzes/discussions valuable
regardless.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I am no fan of ESRI, but if you are serious about map cartography in the long
run as part of your career you should probably learn ArcGIS. In almost every
way QGIS either matches or exceeds ArcGIS (discounting the hideously expensive
extensions) except for cartography. The out of the box cartographic tools in
ArcGIS remain unrivaled.

Most serious cartographers (NatGeo, NYTimes, etc.) that I know of will do line
work and maybe some/all labeling in GIS and then export the vectors to
Photoshop/Illustrator for the finishing.

~~~
aw3c2
Which specific tools or features are you referring to?

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SOLAR_FIELDS
Specifically the labeling engine is very nice, but the other tools listed here
are quite valuable as well: [http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/tool-
reference/cartography/...](http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/tool-
reference/cartography/an-overview-of-the-cartography-toolbox.htm)

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chrissnell
Wow! Thanks for the tip about QGIS. I have a degree in Geography and I got
really good at ArcGIS in school but haven't touched it since because I didn't
own a (reaaaaally expensive) license for it. I tried QGIS out just now and I'm
totally blown away. I'm building a map of public lands in Utah for an off-road
trip that I'm taking in a few weeks. I've never touched this software in my
life but it only took a shapefile downloaded from the State of Utah GIS folks
and about 20 minutes to make something pretty with QGIS:

[https://i.imgur.com/P6zZjCJ.jpg?1](https://i.imgur.com/P6zZjCJ.jpg?1)

I did all of this from my ThinkPad running Arch Linux and with a HiDPI
display. Everything just worked out-of-the-box and looks beautiful. Awesome!

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dmurray
> But this is 2018, and in order to be useful, the map also needed some
> connection back to the digital world. I added GPS coordinates and a
> clickable URL link to a Google Maps location for each tennis court.

I was expecting this would be a QR code, so the print version still has "some
connection back to the digital world"

~~~
crowbahr
QR coordinate data should be pretty easy, right?

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kingofpandora
> What I was looking for here was something called a Shapefile, a geospatial
> data format that nerdy geographers use.

Nerds use better formats than shapefiles. GeoJSON, GeoPackage, spatialite, ...
those are nerdy.

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matallo
> Next up was the laborious process of determining which bus lines one could
> actually take to each tennis court. My approach was 100% analog, starting
> from the top of the alphabetical list of tennis courts (Alamo Square) and
> marching straight through to the end (Youngblood Coleman), noting all of the
> bus lines that had a stop within reasonable walking distance to a court.

As a cartography nerd myself I was surprised just one comment suggested using
GIS and geospatial analysis to match bus lines to tennis courts. Actually this
very analysis could be made via services that provide a visual interface such
as Mapbox or CARTO.

I recommend watching this documentary where Roger Tomlinson ("father of GIS")
is highlighted
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VLGvWEuZxI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VLGvWEuZxI)

For those interested in learning to create maps on the web and visualize
geospatial data CARTO also has a free MOOC site
[https://carto.com/academy/](https://carto.com/academy/)

Disclosure: I used to work at CARTO

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mynewtb
For matching bus lines they could have use openstreetmap data and what GIS is
meant for: spatial analysis! Find nearest N stops around each court.

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cup-of-tea
The other thing you'll want for custom map making is OpenStreetMap.

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dchuk
Interesting how much time and effort was spent on something that looks great
but uses such a fantastically imprecise icon for the actual thing it's
mapping. Is the bottom of the handle the "point" where the court actually is?

~~~
diggernet
Looks to me like it's using the center of the whole icon (somewhere near the
top of the handle). Which is even more terrible than your guess.

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peterburkimsher
I made a map of the Taiwanese train network using my own implmentation of
Logo. The distance between each station corresponds to the time it takes a
local train to travel that leg.

[http://peterburk.github.io/tra/](http://peterburk.github.io/tra/)

I tried printing it and posting it on various train station platforms, but it
always got taken down within a week. I gave copies to station staff, who never
contacted me. My conclusion was that although design is fun, it's better to do
the marketing first, before making the product.

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Jugurtha
For those interested, IDEO's CEO, Tim Brown, has written an interesting book
entitled " _Change by Design_ ".

~~~
antak07
And also a great article, which is shortened version of a book

[https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-for-action](https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-
for-action)

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DrScump
"I strongly recommend GQIS."

Was that a typo?

Nice project, but I wonder why a Google map was chosen over Openstreetmaps.

~~~
kingofpandora
> I could manipulate the data file in ArcGIS or _QGIS_ , two enormously
> powerful pieces of cartography software. For anyone looking to get into
> amateur cartography, I strongly recommend _GQIS_. It works on a Mac (which
> ArcGIS doesn’t) and its cost (zero dollars!) outweighs its bugginess.

Of course it is, but I think you already know that.

