Community features Blender visualisation with clouds It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for spatial visualisations created in Blender, I’ve certainly featured them enough in this newsletter. This one by Sean Conway is
Community features Dutch railways annual report This visualisation by Jan Willem Tulp is a perfect example of thinking outside the box. It’s such a clever way of looking at temporal spatial data and visualising it
Community features Aerial embroidery I absolutely love anything spatial that has been created in ways you wouldn’t expect, and this aerial embroidery by Victoria Rose is no exception! The attention to detail is
Community features #mapsathome #mapsathome is a great hashtag on Twitter that’s packed full of people sharing random maps and map-related objects that are within their home. I want them all! #mapsathome on Twitter
Community features Radio Garden While not strictly spatial, this fun website lets you explore obscure radio stations from around the world using a 3D map in your browser. It has been created by Jonathan Puckey and his team and it’s quite addictive — I’ve found plenty of
Community features Mapping the shadows of New York City If you wander around any particularly large city, especially in winter, you’ll notice how little sunlight actually reaches the streets. In this visualisation (and accompanying story), The New York
Community features #30DayMapChallenge entries And just like that, the #30DayMapChallenge is over! It’s been a pleasure witnessing all the amazing spatial visualisations that have been produced over the past month. So many people were involved and it’s been fascinating to see the wide range of approaches
Community features Aussie smoke plumes crossing oceans This fantastic animated visualisation by Joshua Stevens shows black carbon being dispersed into the atmosphere as a result of fires across Australia. The data is from the GEOS forward processing (GEOS-FP) model, which regularly takes observed data and uses that to work out what
Community features Mini Tokyo 3D I have a soft spot for 3D visualisations of public transport, I suppose because my first major spatial visualisation was the London Underground in 3D with animated trains in realtime.
Community features Open Infrastructure Map Infrastructure is fascinating to me, especially when it requires taking a step back to comprehend the sheer scale and complexity of it. The Open Infrastructure Map by Russ Garrett is
Community features Autumn foliage colours across the United States Arguably my favourite season of the year, Autumn can completely transform a landscape through the changing colours of leaves. This map by The Washington Post visualises the types of forests across the United States and the colours you might find there. I also like
Community features Mineral map style This map by Madison Draper is a modern interpretation of a map from 1940. Aside from being visually impressive, what’s also interesting is that it doesn’t use political
Community features Australia shaded relief It’s always a pleasure seeing one of David Garcia’s maps, and this one of Australia is no exception — I love his use of colour. You should check out
Community features Viking Expansion 790-1066 AD A few days ago I didn’t know that I needed a map about the Vikings in my life, then I found this map by PisseGuri82 on Reddit and realised
Community features The beautiful hidden logic of cities This series of maps by Erin Davis colours individual roads by their suffix — street, avenue, etc. The result is an insight into the way cities are planned and structured. I’
Community features San Francisco taxi animations I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this series of maps by Taylor Baldwin, taking taxi data for San Francisco and animating it in various ways. It’s been nice to see the progression as Taylor digs further into the data and refines his approach. Playing with
Community features Long shadows using 20 hill shade layers I think it’s great when people take commonly-used mapping tools and bend them to do interesting and obscure things that you wouldn’t expect them to support. This shadow
Community features Spaghetti Junction — 1m LIDAR DSM This visualisation of LIDAR data was put together by Owen Powell. The colour scheme is bold and beautiful and results in an artistic representation of the underlying data. It was
Community features See which nations are claiming parts of the melting Arctic This map and accompanying article from National Geographic illustrates the complex situation in the Arctic. With so many countries bordering the region, the question of who owns what is not a simple one to answer. See which nations are claiming parts of the melting
Community features MonoCarto 2019 Winners The winners of Daniel P. Huffman’s MonoCarto competition have been announced (previously named the Monochrome Mapping Competition). The winning entries are all fantastic, with my particular favourite being the hand-drawn map of Ireland — so much attention to detail. I’d love to see
Community features Netherlands building ages Using an open dataset of building and address data, this interactive 3D map visualises the age of buildings across the Netherlands. The age needs to be taken with a pinch of salt — as it’s been proven to be inconsistent in places — however it
Community features The White House using LIDAR data This visualisation from Scott Reinhard is another great example of LIDAR data being passed through Blender to create a 3D effect using realistic lighting and shadows. There are no 3D building models being used here — the result is created by artificially extruding GeoTIFF elevation
Community features Landfall — hand-made, physical 3D nautical maps I stumbled across Landfall a few months ago and have been fascinated by their work ever since. Their speciality is physical 3D topographical reliefs that are painstakingly crafted by hand from nautical charts and Ordnance Survey maps. You can commission them to create a
Community features Elastic maps Do you know what would make maps better? If they jiggled and wobbled as you move them around! This is exactly what these elastic maps do, giving elevated areas more elasticity than the lower areas as you move the map around. The result is
Community features Foggy Spaces Ever found it hard to place where you live on a map? I know I have. This concept by Dylan Moriarty is a beautiful way of thinking about maps and how they compare to our mental representation of the places that we’re familiar