Earth Atlas wins award

Interesting news over at Cartotalk this morning. It appears the Earth Atlas, published by Millennium House, has won a prestigious award.

Start of Press Release from the Galley Club

GALLEY CLUB AWARDS 2009
The winners of the 2009 Galley Club Awards have been announced.

The awards, in their 33rd year, celebrate excellence in book and magazine production. The ceremony was held on Friday 19 June at Darling Harbour, Sydney, and was hosted by comedian James O’Loughlin. Around 150 industry professionals were in attendance. Book of the Year went to Earth, published by Millennium House. The full list of recipients can be viewed at the Galley Club website, www.galleyclub.com.au.

End of Press Release.

As I was one of the cartographers involved on this project, I did 80+ maps of islands around Africa, South America and in the Pacific Ocean, I am of course very pleased to see this absolutely wonderful atlas win an award. It’s been a fun project to work on and the end result is looking absolutely stunning:

Canary Islands map from Earth (© Millennium House)

I’ve got some more sample images, as well as a photo of the full-size atlas, over on my main Red Geographics website.

Inflight maps and MAPublisher Label Pro

Last Sunday I flew from Vancouver to Amsterdam, on my way home after the FME User Conference. KLM offers a direct flight on this route, so they are the most obvious choice for me, especially since they tend to use modern Airbus 330’s for their long-haul North America routes. So imagine my shock when I saw an old MD-11 at the gate. Fortunately, this turned out to be a recently modernized one, so it did have personal in-flight entertainment screens (since I can’t sleep on planes, I dread the idea of a long flight without some sort of entertainment).

One thing I noticed is that the maps in the in-flight entertainment system had been updated. This particular system showed major roads (with names/numbers), time zones and the day/night division. Quite nice to see! Combined with the fact that the seat next to me was empty and we left 15 minutes early (I wonder if those two things are somehow connected to eachother…), it wasn’t such a bad flight after all.

After arriving in Amsterdam I switched on my iPhone and was bombarded by a number of emails coming in from Avenza. They concerned the release of MAPublisher 8.1 with the LabelPro labelling extension. This has been in development for a while, during which I got to play with a beta version, and I’m very pleased to see it’s now finally released.

LabelPro offers Maplex-like (I’ve never really looked at Maplex, so it’s hard for me to compare them) text placement within Adobe Illustrator. Obviously this is not always 100% correct, but it’s fairly obvious that this can save a cartographer many hours of manual text placement. Since this all happens within Illustrator, the end result is of course fully editable. It is an extra-cost add-on to MAPublisher, but using it on just one big map can already recoup those costs. A demo version, which will randomly replace every letter, is of course available and I would certainly recommend that all MAPublisher users try this out.

Personally, I think this is a major step forward for MAPublisher and yet another span added to the bridge they’re building between GIS and high-end cartography.

FME User Conference – day 2

Well, wrapping up the FME User Conference, I can say it’s been another interesting one. This morning Don and Dale showed us a bit about the new things coming in FME 2010, some of which I had already seen in beta’s or was revealed earlier in the event.

Certainly an important improvement is security on FME Server. This was not in place before and users would have to rely on other, 3rd party, ways to secure the access to the server. Now that it comes bundled with FME Server itself, it’ll be easier for the average user to set it up.

One thing I’m personally looking forward to to try out is the improved generalisation options that were mentioned by Daniel Pilon of NR-Can in his presentation about generalising a 1:50k topo dataset to 1:250k. This is something I’ve been looking into myself in the past (though a less dramatic scale range) and never really got far with it.

More room for improvement comes with the new 3D stuff that I have already mentioned. I think it will be a good idea to review the workflow for the Virtueel Apeldoorn environment and see if we can cut some corners. In fact, after 3ds and obj writing was announced last december, we have already started to look into those as a possible replacement for DXF in the whole process.

FME User Conference – day 1

Day one of the FME User Conference brought us, as always, the big Don and Dale introduction. I never thought I’d hear AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” at a conference, but they managed to do so. As usual, their introduction once again proves that Safe is a fun company to work at (or, in my case, do business with).

The keynote, delivered by James Fee, touched upon some interesting concepts on how data is being managed and distributed nowadays. One of his main points was that it’s not just about publishing the data, but also about your potential users being able to find it.

The presentations, 2 tracks, covered a wide range of subjects, though it’s surprising to see a very high proportion of FME Server related presentations being done. For me the highlight was Brendan Cunningham of Kilkenny County Council in Ireland, who talked about a SMS notification system powered by FME. My own presentation, about a current project where I have to combine Dutch and Belgian data into one coherent set was well-received and I’m pretty pleased with how it went.

In the afternoon it was time for FME Idol and FMEopardy (an FME version of jeopardy), which once again were great fun to laugh. The day was ended with the conference social up in the Roundhouse Lodge at Whistler Blackcomb Mountain (not a bad place to be, to be honest).

FME User Conference – day 0

Well, it’s technically not the first day of the conference, that doesn’t start until tomorrow, but I participated in some of the technical sessions today and already saw some interesting things. This is all based on what we’ve seen in the FME 2010 beta build used at the conference:

• PDF writing is apparently improved quite a bit. This is good news for me because I occasionally get questions along the lines of “can you do 5000 maps with driving directions?” (yes, an actual question…) and FME is a perfect tool for doing the processing. If the output can be made to look fairly decent, this would be a very serious option.
• There is a replacement for the FME Viewer on the way. Still in a very early stage, but it’s looking pretty good. This new tool, the DataInspector, will do 3D as well.
• I’ve noticed a couple of new transformers that seem to indicate that network analisys is an upcoming frontier for FME.
• Many 3D formats can now also be read (OBJ, 3DS, Sketchup) and have support for textures. Getting a textured model from Sketchup into 3D PDF is a breeze now.
• Dynamic reading/writing is another big thing. I haven’t had much change to use this in real-world scenarios yet, apart from using a Generic Writer once, but based on what I’ve seen this could be a very useful thing in environments where a data model may slightly change over time. Also, clever use of a SchemaMapper can save a lot of repetitive use of AttributeCreators, AttributeSetters and AttributeCopiers.

Aside from all that, it’s nice to meet other FME users and see what they’re up to. The atmosphere at the FME events is always very relaxed.

Not immediately conference-related, but worth a mention, is the fact that over the past years I’ve not used FME to mosaick large amounts of raster data, based on some bad experiences way back with FME 2006, preferring Global Mapper instead. Dale Lutz recently told me that I really ought to give FME another chance, so when I get back from this trip I’ll see if I can set up some benchmarking tests to figure this out once and for all.

FME user conference 2009

The 2009 FME User Conference starts on Thursday (with pre-conference workshops and training sessions commencing today) and I’m currently on my way to Whistler to attend. This time, I’m set to do one lightning talk (processing 3D data for an online virtual city) and one presentation (processing topographic data from 2 different national mapping agencies, combining them into a single dataset).

The rest of the programme lookes very interesting and there seems to be a fairly heavy focus on 3D this time. I’m looking forward to it!

Emotional Cartography

There’s a free e-book available on Emotional Cartography. From the summary:

Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.

I haven’t had a chance to read through the whole thing myself, but it certainly looks very interesting.

Po Valley panorama map

I often embark on side-projects to investigate new techniques, new software or just to try and expand my portfolio. However, the main problem I have with these side projects is trying to find the time to do them.

Po Valley postr

This is a perfect sample of such a project. A poster, intended to be printed at A2 size, of the Po Valley in Northern Italy. It’s been in production since the summer of 2008 and, in its current form, it’s been sitting on my harddisk since January. I finally decided to add it to my portfolio at freelancecartographer.com. I may still finish it and have it printed, but I have no idea when I get around to doing that.

For those of you interested in the production: I’ve combined SRTM (the post-processed version supplied by CGIAR) with Etopo1 elevation data using Global Mapper, then rendered the resulting terrain in Visual Nature Studio, using the free 250 m resolution True Marble imagery as overlay. The rendering had to be done in segments due to memory constraints (high resolution and the atmospheric effects being used , these segments were combined in Photoshop, where I also tweaked the contrast of the image a bit and highlighted the major rivers. Then the labels were added in Illustrator, using a 2nd, low-res reference render from Visual Nature Studio, which featured labels placed on the major cities and mountain peaks. Additional cities were added by triangulating their positions.

Cartography Design Annual #2 coming up

Nick Springer, of Cartotalk fame, has just announced that submissions for the second edition of the Cartography Design Annual are now open. Two of my maps made (the Oolaalaa globe maps and Apeldoorn city map) made it into the first edition, along with many maps by other cartographers that I personally admire very much. To me it’s a great honor to be included in that first edition and I am certainly going to try and submit another one. The problem with that is that most of the maps I do are comissioned by clients and it may not always be up to me to decide whether or not to submit it.

So… if you have a map that you want to submit, or want to get yourself a copy of the first edition, check out cartographyannual.com

Flex Projector : too much fun!

Even though it’s been around for a while, I haven’t really looked at Flex Projector until earlier this week. But I got hooked instantly and am now trying to come up with a nice projection that looks good and has low distortion values. Ah, another proof I’m a map-geek I guess…

Flex Projector is an application developed by Bernhard Jenny (Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich) and Tom Patterson (US National Park Service). It’s a freeware, cross-platform application for creating custom world map projections. The interface allows you to easily modify dozens of popular world map projections—the possibilities range from slight adjustments to making completely new projections.

So if you’re looking to develop your own map projection (you can have it named after you!) or just want to get a better understanding of how map projections work, give Flex Projector a try. Oh, and check out the other stuff Bernhard and Tom have done, it’s awesome!