Featured maps

Lucie Woellenstein has created a visualisation of the most complex motorway junctions in Britain, beautiful in it’s simplicity. The complexity was defined by creating a buffer around each junction and working out the number of road nodes, road intersections, and the number of

Spatial Awareness, also known as the Eleanor Lutz Fan Club! This time I’m featuring her fascinating map on the geology of Mars. Based on an original map by the USGS, Eleanor has given it her own twist and also translated the key into

John Snow’s cholera map needs no introduction. This 2019 version by Janett Baresel, Cheryl Lau and Raluca Nicola takes his map into the third dimension. It’s not just for the sake of it though, the 3D aspect allows for the “stacks of

Back in 2018 Bing released a dataset containing 125 million building footprints across the US, generated using machine learning. This interactive map by Azavea highlights just how many of those footprints aren’t currently contained within OpenStreetMap. Building Footprint Comparison | Azavea Demo AppAzavea Demo

More Blender-based shading this issue with this beautiful map of the Mont Blanc massif by Santi Hernández Puig. Not sure it’s ever possible to get bored of these maps. Lovely stuff. New map of the #MontBlanc massif designed from scratch. Classic style but

Ever wondered how satellite imagery is captured on a daily basis? This visualisation by Nadieh Bremer shows how Planet map the Earth in a single day using 600,000 images captured from their fleet of satellites. Outstanding work! 👌 I’d also recommend reading the

I love this map, not for its looks but instead for the novelty and technicality. It shows all the lighthouses from OpenStreetMap and uses signal sequence data (if available) to accurately flash the lights as they would in reality. It’s quite hypnotic. geodienst/

You may have noticed that I’ve featured John Nelson’s maps before. This time I wanted to feature John’s awesome map of the Appalachian Trail and his guide on how he created it. Would love to see more maps created (and printed)

I featured the Ordnance Survey map of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site back in the first issue. It’s a great map! This story map from them is a further celebration of the landing and looks into the importance of Moon maps and

National Geographic have digitally compiled 6,000+ maps from their vintage collection. Some of these maps will be slowly released over the coming weeks as they work their way through the huge collection. Aside: I debated adding this one to the newsletter as the

Owen Powell has put together a beautiful shaded relief map of the North Sea using Blender and elevation data from EMODnet. I love the colour scheme! 🎨 The North Sea. Excellent (EU funded) data from @EMODnet #b3d pic.twitter.com/a3H1Nn7X9C — Owen Powell (@owenjpowell)

This map by Sarah Bell is another great example of a monochrome map. In it she uses isochrones to show all the climbing areas within 3 hours of Vancouver. Nice attention to detail! 👌 Rock Climbing Map: Vancouver, British ColumbiaSometimes people ask me if I

Have you ever wanted an interactive map in your command-line interface? Probably not. Even so, MapSCII is quirky, retro and as interesting for the technology as it is for its novelty (it uses vector tiles!). rastapasta/mapscii🗺 MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world

Trails of Wind maps airport runways from around the world, colour-coding them by orientation. The result is a beautiful map that highlights the intricate patterns created by the runways as each is orientated to maximise the use of prevailing winds. Also worth checking out

I’m a sucker for 3D spatial visualisations and this one of Super Typhoon Nepartak by Craig Taylor is no exception. He’s taken NASA precipitation radar data and used reflectivity values to define both colour and intensity of the 3D points. I spent

Andrew Tyrrell has used LINZ LIDAR data to create a crisp map with detailed shadows where the elevation changes. If you’re interested in this effect then check out the go-to tutorial on the technique by Daniel Huffman. Playing#wip #b3d #cartography @LINZLDS pic.

This hypnotic map by John Nelson shows the seasonal ebb and flow of sea ice as it freezes and thaws over the past 40 years. He also looks at alternative methods of visualising the same data to explore how sea-ice extents have changed in

Mapping the Arctic region is challenging due to the ever-changing coastline caused by glaciers and retreating ice sheets. Over the past 2 years Laura Gerrish has been working on collecting up-to-date data to produce this incredibly detailed map for the British Antarctic Survey. New

Wes Jones has produced an amazing watercolour map for the Esri basemap collection. What’s even more impressive about this is that, aside from the watercolour textures, the basemap is vector. He even took watercolour classes to be able to create this. That’s

You may have seen Daniel Coe’s stunning LIDAR river visualisations before. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat! He regularly posts similar images so I recommend having a dig through his Twitter feed. Lovely stuff! #IFSAR-derived image of the

This beautiful map by Fabien Lezeau shows the areas that would be affected by varying categories of hurricanes. The LIDAR-based relief adds an extra element of detail and context to the map. Created using QGIS and Blender. I added some relief to my Hurricane

Hugely exciting? Perhaps not. Still, this well-presented roundup of map projections is both interesting and useful all at the same time. Map Projections in ArcGIS

I’ll save you from the “apeeling” map jokes. But seriously, this juicy map created by Chris Whong is a humorous insight into the distortion caused by Web Mercator. Visualizing the Distortion of WebMercator Maps with an Orange PeelMost modern web maps use a

Eleanor Lutz is back again, this week with a fantastic topographic map of Mercury. She’s also written a detailed tutorial on how to create this map yourself, which also includes code for mapping Mars, Venus, and the Moon! A Topographic Map of MercuryHow

This beautiful elevation map from Liam Mason is a great example of using multiple hillshade layers that have different values for colour and angle of light. Lovely stuff. If you want to make something like this yourself then John Nelson has written a well-illustrated