This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.
There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
The design history of the New York subway map.
A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
Minimalist cartography.
This is a fascinating way to explore time and place—a spyglass view of hundred year old maps overlaid on the digital maps of today.
A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.
You can use Google Maps to explore the worlds of our solar system …and take a look inside the ISS.
In this English language alternative to latitude and longitude coordinates, the Clearleft office is located at:
cross.rooms.quick
Everything you never wanted to know about conveying elevation information on maps, delivered in Peter’s always-entertaining style and illustrated with interactive examples.