Hans van der Maarel has been a passionate cartographer for over 20 years. He works out of Zevenbergen, Netherlands where he operates his company, Red Geographics. To Hans, cartography is a passion that extends beyond the office, becoming more than just a career path. Through this passion, Hans has developed a level of expertise found only in the most dedicated of map-making professionals. As an expert MAPublisher user, Hans has been a frequent contributor to the Avenza Resources Blog. You can see some of his latest work through his Georeferencing Techniques Video tutorials released as part of Avenza’s Mapping Class blog series. To read more about Red Geographics, and see more of Hans’s work, visit redgeographics.com.
From a young age, Hans always had a keen interest in maps. His found himself drawn to old atlasses, spending hours looking at old maps, and geography was always his favourite subject in school. This interest persisted into high school, where at a job fair he found out you could actually study map-making as a career.
Continuing his studies, Hans pursued a program in Geo-Informatics at Hogeschool Utrecht (a four-year bachelor’s level course offering a mix of geodesy, GIS, and cartography). There he was introduced to various kinds of mapping and surveying, learning the techniques necessary to plan and design meaningful effective maps. During an internship at the National Spatial Planning Agency, he was first introduced to the MAPublisher plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. After graduation he started working for his local Avenza partner, doing tech support, training, consultancy, and commercial map production processes. This is also where he was introduced to Safe Software and their product for data transformation, also known as Feature Manipulation Engine (FME).
Hans developed a niche within the Dutch cartographic community that leveraged FME to prepare raw source data before using MAPublisher to visualize and create the final high-quality map products. This type of workflow, combining a mix of both FME and MAPublisher functionalities is now fully realized by the FME Auto add-on for MAPublisher.
“I was doing my first internship and was tasked to produce a poster-sized map of The Netherlands in Adobe Illustrator, but all the base data was in Shapefiles or ArcInfo coverages. Gathering base data and generalizing it was done in a traditional GIS, but getting that data into Illustrator and making a finished map required MAPublisher.”
In September 2004, Hans decided to continue on his own and founded Red Geographics. Working largely with Avenza products, two years later, he became an official Avenza partner and reseller. As his customer base expanded and more projects came in, Red Geographics developed a reputation of being “the one for the difficult projects”. Reflecting on the early years of Red Geographic’s operation, Hans mentioned some of his more memorable, fun, and eye-catching projects.
“There was the Oolaalaa Globe, a 5 ft diameter “beanbag” globe with beautiful maps printed on spandex. We received several custom orders of the globe map from other clients, including ones for Air France-KLM with the complete route networks of all their partners, and another from National Geographic Benelux and the City of Amsterdam, with a map of the city projected onto the globe.”
Also eye-catching, but for a completely different reason, were a series of simple basemaps created for Buienradar, the most popular Dutch weather website, and app. Millions of people have seen Hans’s maps when they checked the weather.
In the early years of Red Geographics, Hans became involved with the Cartotalk forum, first as an enthusiastic user, later on as a moderator, and finally an admin. Through Cartotalk, he also got involved with NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society. He attended their meeting in Salt Lake City in 2005 and he’s been to every meeting since. When NACIS took over Cartotalk, Hans became an ex-officio board member for several years before being formally elected a board member at large. He still serves on the board to this day and is currently in his 2nd term as secretary. Through NACIS, Hans was able to expand his network of international contacts, allowing him to contribute to several large-scale mapping and atlas projects. He created island maps that can be found in the Millennium House “Earth” atlas and more recently, several full-page maps for the 11th Edition National Geographic World Atlas released in 2019.
Building on the success of his earlier globe projects, Hans then created a new map whose design is displayed prominently on a new product called BalancePlanet, a globe-themed, fully functional yoga-ball that Hans considers a spiritual successor to the Oolaalaa globe bean bag chair.
In 2019, Hans expanded his team, adding two members to become a team of three. With more resources now available, Hans and his team can now tackle larger, more complex (mapping) projects. His team took on the momentous task of producing a nationwide 1:20,000 scale topographic base map of the entire country of Luxembourg. The finished results were used as a cartographic base for tourist maps showing hiking and cycling routes all over the country.
“The Avenza products have been a major factor in my development as a cartographer, as well as the development of my company,” says Hans. Many of his projects use a combination of FME and MAPublisher, and Hans has utilized the interoperability between these two programs to implement significant workflow automation. With a single base dataset, multiple maps can be made with the same style, and automating this process means he can produce a high volume of maps in just seconds, without needing to manually configure shared thematic elements.
“With automating some of the map production processes, I now only have to focus on the parts where my cartographic skills are most needed. MAPublisher allows me to do that. I want to find the right balance between quality and speed when it comes to producing maps, and with automating the data processes I have found just that.”
Aside from the traditional mapping products Hans has become known for, he enjoys working on smaller projects with interesting stories around them. “The maps I get the most joy out of these days are, interestingly enough, not those big ones. Over the past ten years or so I’ve been asked to produce greyscale maps for several academic publications, a lot of them focusing on the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Limited in terms of visual variables and often a need to show a lot of information on a small surface area, these kinds of maps are a very interesting challenge. One thing led to another, word-of-mouth is a great promotion tool, and we now find ourselves in the middle of producing about 30 maps for an upcoming publication by Cambridge University Press, chronicling the state of research in those areas. Wonderfully esoteric subjects which often lead me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole!”
Hans continues to use his cartography skill set to explore new ways of making maps more prominent in everyday life. Hans began introducing his colleague, Inge van Daelen, to the concepts of satellite imagery and Photoshop (using Tom Patterson’s great tutorial on how to process Landsat data). Branching off of this, they founded Blue Geographics, which originally started as a fun side-project but quickly grew into a full-fledged business. Through Blue Geographics, Hans designs and produces a range of sportswear and lifestyle items displaying beautiful satellite images derived from Landsat and Sentinel data.
“Looking ahead, I just want to make beautiful things,” says Hans, “One of my hobbies is photography, specifically cycling and cosplay. A few years ago, when I did a photoshoot with two cosplayers, I saw a sticker with that text in their workshop and it struck a chord with me. I’ve long had ‘doing awesome work for people I like’ as one of my goals and I want to keep on doing that. I also want to keep on challenging myself by trying out new techniques and new ways to map things. There’s still a lot to learn and I am very happy to know a lot of people in the cartographic community who are happy to share their knowledge and experiences.”
Welcome back to another exciting edition of Mapping Class, a video-blog series where we curate tutorials and workflows created by expert cartographers and Avenza power users from around the world. Today we release Part Two of our Georeferencing Techniques tutorial with Hans van der Maarel, owner of Red Geographics. In Part Two, Hans demonstrates some techniques he has developed for working with more challenging georeferencing tasks, including dealing with unknown projection information and working with scanned maps. If you missed Part One, in which Hans covers the basics of Georeferencing in MAPublisher, check it out here.
Hans has produced a jam-packed video walkthrough detailing his georeferencing process. The Avenza team has produced video notes (below) to help you follow along.
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Georeferencing Techniques Part Two: Working with Scanned Maps by Hans van der Maarel (video notes by the Avenza team)
As we discussed in last month’s Mapping Class, georeferencing is the process of taking imagery or map data that lacks geographic location information and associating it with specific coordinates on Earth. Previously, Hans showed us how MAPublisher provides a few tools that make georeferencing simple vector map data a painless process (Check out part one here!). Best of all, using the built-in georeferencing tools, this can be done entirely within the Adobe Illustrator environment.
However, what can you do if you are working with historical maps or scanned images that lack spatial referencing or detailed projection information? This can present a challenge for many cartographers, as the projection information is necessary to create an effective cartographic product that will minimize distortion and maximize the spatial accuracy of the final result. To tackle this problem, Hans shares a series of tips and tricks that he uses for working with scanned historical maps. He uses a beautiful historical map of Northwest Africa to demonstrate his approach.
Right away, Hans identifies a few obstacles. First, he notices that the scan is not a perfect copy of the original map. Due to natural curves and bends in the physical paper version of the map, there is minor distortion in the digital image that arose when the map was scanned. This could create problems for georeferencing the image, as the “fitting” process can be susceptible to image distortions, even when a suitable projection is determined. Thus it is always a good idea to examine your scanned map prior to beginning the georeferencing process. Becoming aware of potential issues with the scanned map data can help inform decisions on the data’s suitability for a particular mapping task. Acknowledging that the distortion is relatively minor in this scanned map, Hans chooses to proceed with the georeferencing process.
Hans notices that the scanned map image does not provide any details on the original projection information. Instead, Hans must make an “educated guess” on which projection was being used. With a bit of research, he discovers another map from roughly the same era and displaying a similar region. Recognizing the similarities between this map, and his scanned map, Hans decides to implement a Lambert Zenithal (Azimuthal) Equal Area Projection.
Hans discovered this map from 1968, which displays approximately the same area. He chooses to use the projection information from this map to help with the georeferencing process of his scanned map.
Hans can begin his georeferencing process by first setting up a new MAP View with the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area Projection, a conical projection used in many atlas-style maps. To help with the georeferencing process, Hans has used the Import tool to display a vector line layer of coastlines using Natural Earth Data. He can use this coastline data as a guide to help align his scanned map during the georeferencing process.
Before moving on, Hans brings up two important things one must consider when working with conical projections: the central meridian and the latitude of origin. When working with scanned maps that include graticule lines, a quick and easy way to help identify the central meridian is to look for the meridian line that closest approximates a straight line. Using the graticules on the scanned map, Hans can approximate a central meridian of about 11 Degrees. In the MAP View Editor, a user can open the projected Coordinate System Editor and modify the definition for the lambert azimuthal equal-area projection to have a central meridian that matches his estimation.
Placing the scanned map layer onto his newly modified MAP view, Hans can then begin the process of manually aligning the map image to match his projected coastline data. One of the easiest ways to support this process is to configure the MAP View editor panel to display layer thumbnails. With this configured, a user can begin manually adjusting the MAP layers until they are suitably aligned.
Hans reiterates that this process is not an exact science. He has made several assumptions on the projection parameters, and the overall accuracy of the original map. He indicates that a user should spend some time trying to get the best possible result, however it will be difficult to achieve a perfect match (especially given the distortions that can occur when a map is scanned from a physical copy). This process can take anywhere from minutes to hours, and requires a lot of manual adjustment, trial and error, and most importantly, patience! The result, however, is that the finalized scanned map layer is correctly projected and georeferenced into a MAP view. From here, adding data layers, annotations, labels, or tracing vector layers from the scanned map can all be completed in a spatially aware mapping environment.
Providing a second example using a slightly different approach, this time Hans uses a map of the Arctic Region. He indicates that although he has been provided with a map of the entire polar region, the client is only interested in the area surrounding the Bering Strait (between Russia and Alaska). As with the previous example, the first step is to identify the best projection to use. Hans correctly guesses that the map provided likely uses the Polar Azimuthal Equidistant Projection based on visual inspection. However, it should be noted that there is room for trial and error here, and users should not be afraid to explore the large coordinate system and projections library included with MAPublisher to try out and test different projections to help narrow down one that fits best.
The first thing Hans notices is that the scanned map image is rotated about -90 Degrees from what is displayed in his reference coastline data. Once again, by visiting the MAP View Editor, Hans can rotate his Map layers without breaking the spatial referencing information of his original map data. By doing this, Hans assures that his map layers are aligned on the same rotational angle, and can then begin to focus on scaling the layers.
Hans uses the MAP view editor panel to apply manual adjustments to the map layers. He notes that a cartographer should always consider the area of the map they are most interested in. For example, although his map covers the entire polar region, Hans indicates the final product will only display the regions surrounding the Bering Strait. Given this, the georeferencing process should be primarily concerned with accurate alignment in the Bering Strait area, while distortion in other areas is seen as acceptable. In the example below, you can see how Hans has achieved a suitable level of georeferencing accuracy in his primary area of interest, despite the non-important areas (i.e the Canadian Polar region, eastern Siberia, Greenland) having relatively low georeferencing accuracy.
With his newly georeferenced scanned map layers. A cartographer can now use the information contained within these scans to supplement a larger cartographic process. For example, Hans can now use the scanned maps to digitize boundaries, or geographic features that may not be present in modern digital datasets (for example, historical boundaries for different countries, or terrain features that are no longer present)
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About the Author
Hans van der Maarel is the owner of Red Geographics, located in Zevenbergen, Netherlands. Red Geographics is a long-time partner of Avenza and Hans is a well-known power user of both MAPublisher and Geographic Imager. He uses the products for a wide range of cartographic projects for several international organizations and offers training courses and consultancy expertise aimed at developing workflows for clients. In addition to that, he is currently a board member of NACIS. To find out more about Red Geographics, and to see more work by Hans, visit redgeographics.com
The Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS) promotes interest in map design and significant design advances in cartography. Avenza Systems sponsors several awards for the Student Entries at the Annual Map Design Competition which is open to all map makers in Canada and the United States. Students are highly encouraged to apply to this competition
The winners of the Annual Map Design Competition 2020 include aspiring map makers from many schools throughout North America. Avenza is proud to announce that the winners of the David Woodward Digital Map Award are Yu Lan and Sridhar Lam for their maps titled ‘The Animated Bivariate Map of COVID-19’ and ‘Geovisualization of the York Region 2018 Business Directory’, respectively. In addition, Avenza is proud to announce that the winners of the Arthur Robinson Print Map Award are Kevin Chen and Nicholas Weatherbee for their maps titled Victoria and the Halifax Tram Network, respectively.
“We used the bivariate map to represent the daily relative risk and the number of days that a county has been in a cluster. In this product, users are able to discover the space-time pattern by watching and playing with the animated and interactive map.“ – Yu Lan, Ph.D. Student, UNC Charlotte
The Animated Bivariate Map of COVID-19 by Yu Lan
“Overall, the dashboard provides an effective geovisualization with a spatial context and location detail of the York Region’s 2018 businesses. The dashboard design offers a dark theme interface maintaining a visual hierarchy of the different map elements such as the map title, legend, colour scheme, colour combinations ensuring contrast and balance, font face selection and size, background and map contrast, choice of hues, saturation, emphasis etc.” – Sridhar Lam, Master of Spatial Analysis, Ryerson.
Geovisualization of the York Region 2018 Business Directory by Sridhar Lam
“This map aims to produce a detailed, accurate, and visually appealing topographic map of Victoria, British Columbia. It was generalized using data from two different scales to a final scale of 1:100,000. Hillshades were created to enhance the terrain visualization. My goal is to start a meaningful career in cartography and GIS” – Kevin Chen, Nova Scotia Community College
Victoria Map, created using Avenza MAPublisher, by Kevin Chen
Welcome back to another exciting edition of Mapping Class, a new video-blog series where we curate tutorials and workflows created by expert cartographers and Avenza power users from around the world. For this article, we are excited to introduce Hans van der Maarel, owner of Red Geographics, and expert cartographer. Joining us from Netherlands, Hans has put together a video tutorial showcasing tips and tricks for tackling Georeferencing in a variety of different mapping scenarios. In this first part, Hans goes over the basics of georeferencing in MAPublisher, using a neat city map of Zevenbergen. Tune in for Part Two, coming soon, which will reveal how Hans approaches more challenging georeferencing tasks, including dealing with unknown projection information and working with historical maps.
Hans has produced a short video walkthrough detailing part one of his georeferencing process. The Avenza team has produced video notes (below) to help you follow along.
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Georeferencing Techniques Part One: The Basics by Hans van der Maarel (video notes by the Avenza team)
Georeferencing is the process of taking imagery or map data that lacks geographic location information and associating it with specific coordinates on Earth. Georeferencing is a very common, but sometimes challenging step that is necessary for producing accurate, meaningful cartographic products. By georeferencing map data, cartographers can ensure that the features on their maps are located correctly, and in a way that accurately represents the real world. Georeferencing also makes it easy to add and update maps with new data layers, as location information stored within the new map layers will be accurately overlaid in the correct position on older map projects. The process for georeferencing maps can be complicated, but Hans has outlined some easy-to-follow steps for quickly performing and validating simple georeferencing tasks with vector map data.
In general, effective georeferencing needs to include at minimum three known control points. In this example, Hans has included an additional fourth control point to provide additional accuracy.
When locating control points, it is a good idea to choose points that roughly approximate the four corners (quadrants) of your map area. Doing so can ensure the georeferencing result is accurate for the entire coverage of the map area and minimizes distortion/shearing effects as the map layers are matched to the final coordinate system. Cartographers should take time to ensure the chosen control points are as accurate as possible, as errors in control point placement will propagate across all locations in the map. Poor control point placement can lead to overall poor georeferencing accuracy.
Using the MAP Page location tool, place four control points at known, easily identifiable locations. Hans recommends placing control points at recognizable map features that can be easily seen on the reference imagery. For this example, Hans chose to use the corners and edges of major structures (i.e larger buildings/reservoirs) or the centers of well-known major road intersections. When using road features as reference control points, Hans recommends using the center of the feature rather than the edge. This can compensate for variation in road edge placement that can occur when the vector line layer does not completely match the true road/lane width in the imagery.
Next, open the Georeferencing tool and select the “Add World Locations” option. From here, use the built-in web map to calculate latitude/longitude coordinates for each of your known control points. Using the satellite imagery view can make this process easier, especially when dealing with physical features on the map (i.e building corners). Repeat this for each of the four control points.
The resulting table will show a list of set coordinates for each of these control points. From here, if you already know the projection the map data is already in, you may set this coordinate system at this stage. If you are unsure, the georeferencer tool will automatically provide a suggested list of coordinate systems that match the control points you have set. These “best” matches are provided based on measuring the error between your user set coordinates and the real-world locations on the web map. Ideally, you want the lowest combined error value. In general, the suggested coordinate systems at the top of the list are often the best choice.
Once you select the desired coordinate system, the tool will automatically create a new MAP View where you can house your newly georeferenced map data. You will notice that the MAP Page Locations you created earlier will be displayed alongside the newly georeference control points. This is a great way to help validate your georeferencing as you will be able to observe the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of your placed control points.
Finally, it is a good idea to use the Find Places tool to validate your georeferencing results. Try searching for identifiable landmarks or major features on your map (i.e. train stations). Simply search for a location using the Find Places tool, and compare this to the georeferenced locations on your map.
This concludes Part One of “Georeferencing Techniques with Hans van der Maarel“. Now that you have covered the basics of Georeferencing in MAPublisher, tune in for part two in the next edition of Mapping Class. There you will see how Hans tackles more complex georeferencing projects, including what to do when you have small-scale maps that come from scanned or printed images, or where projection or referencing information is unavailable. Hans will be using a beautiful historical map of northwest Africa to demonstrate this problem. Look for it in the Avenza Resources Blog next month.
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About the Author
Hans van der Maarel is the owner of Red Geographics, located in Zevenbergen, Netherlands. Red Geographics is a long-time partner of Avenza and Hans is a well-known power user of both MAPublisher and Geographic Imager. He uses the products for a wide range of cartographic projects for several international organizations and offers training courses and consultancy expertise aimed at developing workflows for clients. In addition to that, he is currently a board member of NACIS. To find out more about Red Geographics, and to see more work by Hans, visit redgeographics.com
We are happy to announce that MAPublisher 10.8, the latest update to the MAPublisher plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, is now available. With this release, we are excited to bring forward new usability enhancements for several MAPublisher tools. We are also thrilled to confirm that MAPublisher now supports raster files in the enhanced compression wavelet (ECW) format. Alongside these enhancements, we have also implemented improvements and added expanded support to our coordinate system library.
Here is what you can expect with the latest MAPublisher 10.8 release:
Usability Improvements for MAPublisher Tools
The Avenza team is always working to improve the capabilities of our vast suite of cartography tools. We work with our users to implement improvements to our tool catalog that truly meet the needs of actual mapping professionals. In this release we are introducing several enhancements to some of our existing tools:
Multi-Column selections in the Attribute Table Editing Schema
In the early versions of MAPublisher 10, we added the ability to select multiple columns within the Edit Schema window of the MAP attributes panel, allowing users to toggle visibility settings on multiple attribute columns at the same time. Now with 10.8, we are delighted to build on this by implementing the ability to configure data properties across multiple selected attribute columns. Users can not only toggle visibility or remove multiple attribute columns at once, but can now also edit default values, attribute size, and read-only settings for all selected values. Additionally, users can now change the data type (i.e string, integer, boolean, etc) for multiple selected attribute columns all at once, as long as each column shares the same starting data type.
Select and add multiple MAP Locations in Line Plotter
We continue to bring improvements to the Line Plotter tool, this time by introducing the ability to select multiple MAP locations and add them to the line vertices (node) list. For users familiar with the Point-by-point plotting method in Line Plotter, this will be especially useful for adding a large collection of sequential MAP locations, as previously each point needed to be entered one at a time.
Document Summary Panel now includes “Last Saved with” Version Info
For users working with MAPublisher projects across different versions of the software, you will be delighted to know that the document summary dialogue now includes information indicating the version of MAPublisher the project was last saved with. This information will help users that frequently share MAPublisher projects with colleagues, allowing them to better establish version standards across collaborative projects.
Overprint Options in MAP Themes
Previous versions of MAPublisher required a user to navigate the Illustrator attributes panel to configure overprint options for each map element individually and refer to these options separately using MAP Themes. Now with MAPublisher 10.8, an overprint option has been implemented directly within the MAP Themes panel, allowing users to configure overprint settings for fills and strokes within each stylesheet in the MAP Themes tool.
Scale bar, Create Legend, and Elevation Profile tool previews with Background Colours
We have added a small improvement to the scale bar, create legend, and elevation profile tool panel. The preview window for these tools, which allows users to adjust and edit their visual properties before adding them to the map, now has the option to configure a preview background colour. This option is helpful when configuring light, or white-coloured map elements which were previously difficult to see against the default white preview background.
Support for Raster ECW file formats
New to MAPublisher 10.8, we now include Enhanced Compression Wavelet raster files to our growing lists of supported data formats. Users can now import and work with ECW files directly within the MAPublisher environment of Adobe Illustrator, all while retaining necessary spatial integrity, and without needing to convert your data.
Engine Improvements and Updated Coordinate system catalogue
We are working continuously to improve the back-end MAPublisher engine to ensure our users can continue their work in an optimized, seamless, design-focused cartographic environment. Along with improvements to our engine and bug fixes, we have built on our current coordinate system catalogue with updates to the coordinate system and projection library. This means our list of supported projections has grown, with new additions including the Natural Earth and Natural Earth 2 Projections created by Tom Patterson. For a full list of our expanded coordinate systems library please check the projections guide in the Avenza Support center.
MAPublisher 10.8 is immediately available today, free of charge to all current MAPublisher users with active maintenance subscriptions and as an upgrade for non-maintenance users.
Find out more at the Avenza User Conference!
Want to learn more about MAPublisher? Want to see how industry professionals are using Avenza Products in their organizations? Join us on May 12th, 11am – 5pm (EST) for the first-ever Avenza User Conference. Registration is Free!
The event will feature a full day of speaker presentations from the Mapping and Geospatial communities. The Avenza Product teams will also be on hand to answer questions and give you a sneak peek of upcoming developments to the Avenza Platform. Sign up for free at avenza.com/user-conference
Steve Spindler has cultivated a passion for cartography that has continued for more than 25 years. He operates Steve Spindler Cartography, which develops custom-designed cartographic pieces that can be seen in map products utilized by governments, city planning organizations, and nonprofits from across the country. He also manages wikimapping.com, a public engagement tool that allows city planners to connect and receive input from their community using digital maps. A passionate cartographer at heart, Steve considers map-making both a hobby and career. He strives to share his ideas, techniques, and truly captivating cartographic style with others, either through his previous teaching at Temple University or through his tutorials hosted on his personal website cartographyclass.com
Steve first began designing maps in the early 1990’s while at Temple University for graduate school. Pursuing a Master’s degree in Urban Studies, Steve found that the cartography lab at Temple was his favourite place to be. Before the widespread accessibility of digital maps, Steve recalls spending time at the Philadelphia Library, exploring map catalogues and manually tracing topographic maps before faxing them to his own computer. Later into his graduate studies, Steve joined a mailing list for digital cartography enthusiasts, and this is where he first learned about Avenza and MAPublisher for Adobe Illustrator. He quickly adopted the software into his map-making process, leveraging its suite of cartography tools to easily create maps within a design-focused environment. He continues to use MAPublisher for much of his work, and some examples, such as the Northeastern Pennsylvania trail system map shown below, are even available digitally on the Avenza Map Store for use in the Avenza Maps app.
After graduating, Steve combined his passion for cycling with his love of map-making. He started designing maps that promoted bicycle transportation. His list of clients grew, and so too did his reputation in the cartography community. Soon his maps were published and shared over a wide range of platforms across the country.
“It was nice to see my maps posted in public places – in office cubicles, in a Congressional office, being waved around by a US Secretary of Transportation, in a Mac OS X keynote, in the subway, on TV shows, in newspapers – I was using MAPublisher to help create them all.”
After several years of high-paced freelance cartography work, Steve chose to revise his business approach to allow him to be more selective in how he engaged with potential projects. “I created an archetype that I wanted to serve, and put energy into solutions that would help this archetype”. Steve mentioned how he prefers to let a client place a value on what they want, first spending time with the client to conceptualize a problem and then delivering a proposed solution, only sending an invoice once it is appropriate. In his words, this requires a knowledgeable client that really understands what they need.
Some years later, he returned to Temple University, this time as an instructor. He taught cartography to students within Temple’s Professional Masters of GIS program and stressed the importance of creating a balance between teaching concepts and teaching software.
“Cartography is really about communicating with an audience, it’s not just about specific software. I think that teaching cartography using a single program (Illustrator with MAPublisher) would allow me to focus more on design concepts and communication. MAPublisher can still access large data sets, and the data is ultimately contained within the Illustrator file.”
His passion for teaching has continued beyond the classroom as well. In the last year, he has taken up a mentorship role for an up-and-coming cartographer. He provides direction and feedback on real-world map projects in what he describes as “learning with purpose”.
Steve also believes it is important to take learning into one’s own hands. To help him evaluate and improve his mapping processes, he often records his work sessions, carefully documenting and annotating many hours of recorded work such that he can revisit and recall specific mapping steps later on. Many of these sessions are edited down into videos that Steve posts on cartographyclass.com, a personal website for sharing his thoughts, ideas, and techniques on creating maps. He regularly shares maps that he creates for fun in his spare time, drawing inspiration from nature, photography, and artwork to create elegant visually engaging map pieces that exemplify the balance of art and science that is cartography. His recent work has explored the use of graphic styles and MAP Themes to create artistic map pieces that mimic the effect of watercolour paintings. Other posts show his use of the elevation profile tool to create unique maps of recent cycling trips.
In addition to the many MAPublisher focused tutorials hosted on his personal website, Steve is also an active contributor to the Mapping Class tutorial video series hosted on the Avenza Resource Blog. His contributions demonstrate unique and innovative workflows that leverage a wide range of MAPublisher tools.
These days Steve continues to take on map-related projects. His approach has allowed him to develop a career that leverages a personal passion and directs it into a successful business. He continues to learn and explore new techniques in cartography in his free time, sharing his thoughts and processes with readers of his blog. After more than 25 years of freelance cartography work, Steve feels his perspective on mapping and business has changed, “Cartography and business are not the same things for me. I want to make maps and don’t need a contract to do this. It’s just a matter of practicing daily. When the right client comes along, I can help out. I like to be helpful.”
We are back with another exciting addition to our Mapping Class tutorial series. The Mapping Class tutorial series curates demonstrations and workflows created by cartographers and Avenza software users. For this article, we are welcoming back Steve Spindler, a longtime MAPublisher user, and expert cartographer. He has shared with us an excellent tutorial on creating a map from scratch using openly available geographic data from OpenStreetMap, and accessed through Overpass turbo. Steve shows how you can create query statements to filter and export the data, and demonstrates how you can import the data into MAPublisher before using a selection of cartographic styling tools to create a visually appealing map.
Steve has produced a short video walkthrough detailing his map-making process. The Avenza team has produced video notes (below) to help you follow along.
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Importing OpenStreetMap data using Overpass Turbo by Steve Spindler (video notes by the Avenza team)
Finding and accessing good quality data is often the first challenge for any cartography project. OpenStreetMap (OSM) can be an excellent source of open vector data describing land cover features (roads, parks, rivers, buildings, trails, infrastructure, boundaries). Once collected, cartographers can use OSM data to create highly detailed maps using the MAPublisher plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. Steve will demonstrate his process of collecting raw data from OSM and using it to craft a beautiful map of the Niagara Falls Area. The following video notes summarize Steve’s approach.
First, you will need to extract some data from the OSM database. Since OSM is a massive repository of geographic data, you’ll need a way to filter through and extract only the data needed for your specific map project. Overpass turbo is a web-based data mining tool that can make querying and exporting OpenStreetMap datasets easy. The tool allows users to apply query statements that filter the OSM database based on attribute and location information. Using the Overpass turbo “Wizard”, a user can enter simple queries (i.e. “water”) and automatically filter and select all features that match the query statement, making it easy to export specific data for your map.
Steve uses a simple query to obtain all map features that are considered “water”. This includes both natural and man-made features
The tool allows the user to export the filtered datasets into geoJSON format, an open standard format for storing and representing geographic data and attributes.
The geoJSON datasets collected from Overpass turbo can then be imported directly into MAPublisher for styling into a finished map. Use the Import tool to load the data onto an Adobe Illustrator artboard. From here, you can open the MAP View editor to adjust the scale and projection information for each map data layer. For this map, reproject the data into State Plane NAD 83 to preserve an accurate spatial scale. Set the scale option to 25,000 and customize the position of the map data on the artboard.
If needed, use the Vector Crop tool to trim the map data down to a specific area of interest, and simplify the layer to create smoother lines by removing excess vertices.
Back in Overpass turbo, you can build more specific query statements to extract individual features from larger data categories. Use the statement: name = “Niagara Falls”, to select polygon features specific to the waterfalls in that area.
Import this new data into MAPublisher, and drag and drop it into the same MAP View as the water layer. The data will be automatically scaled and projected to align with the water layer. Apply a graphic style fill for the water bodies and waterfall area.
Next, we can go back to Overpass Turbo and extract road and highway data. You can build out more complex query statements using basic database operators (i.e. and/or). For longer, complex query statements it helps to create saved queries that you can re-use. This map uses a saved query statement called “selected roads with residential” to extract line features covering most road types:
(highway=primary or highway=secondary or highway=cycleway or highway=path or
highway=motorway or highway=trunk or highway=tertiary or
highway=neighborhood or highway=footway or highway=service)
Import the roads data into the same MAP View as the other datasets. If you look at the MAP attributes you can see the road data is split into several different types. Steve use’s MAP Themes to create rules-based stylesheets to visualize the different road lines based on their road-type attributes. Steve designed a rule-set that made minor roads more subtle in appearance, while major roads and highways became more prominent. He also used colour to distinguish between pedestrian and vehicle network links.
Repeat this process with a building footprint layer and crop all layers in the final map to the artboard extent. The finished product is shown below (top). Some final touch-ups in photo editing software can be used to create a more stylized appearance (bottom).
Exported map from Illustrator
Stylized version modified with Photo editing software
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About the Author
Steve Spindler has been designing compelling cartographic pieces for over 20 years. His company, Steve Spindler Cartography, has developed map products for governments, city planning organizations, and non-profits from across the country. He also manages wikimapping.com, a public engagement tool that allows city planners to connect and receive input from their community using maps. To learn more about Steve Spindler’s spectacular cartography work, visit his personal website. To view Steve’s other mapping demonstrations, visit cartographyclass.com
PLEASE NOTE: As of Photoshop 22.5, Adobe has discontinued support for the program’s 3D features. This may affect some or all elements of this blog. For more information, see Adobe’s FAQ page about this change and the Geographic Imager compatibility information page.
In the world of map-making, shaded relief refers to a visual technique that gives the illusion of three-dimensional terrain on an otherwise flat map. Cartographers use shaded relief to draw the viewer’s eye to prominent topographic features such as mountains, valleys and canyons. Using imaginary illumination sources and digital elevation data to cast directional light on a map, the cartographer can give the illusion of depth, casting shadows into valleys and lowlands, and highlighting ridgelines and peaks as if they are bathed in sunlight.
Historically, this technique was achieved entirely by hand and was extremely labour intensive. Now, with modern graphical software and digital mapping technologies, relief shading can be accomplished right on the desktop.
To demonstrate this, we are going to use the powerful spatial imagery tools and graphical design capabilities of the Geographic Imager plug-in for Adobe Photoshop to explore relief shading using a really interesting 19th-century historical map. Here is a sneak peek to show what the final product will look like.
Let’s start with our original map. We have taken an absolutely stunning United States Geological Survey Map of the world-renowned Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Originally drafted by hand in the year 1899, the map features beautifully drawn contour lines and colour work showing the mountainous topography of the park and its surrounding area. The map, and thousands of others like it, are available in full-resolution on the USGS Historical Map Catalogue. Our goal will be to bring the map to life using three-dimensional (3D) relief shading techniques available with Geographic Imager and Adobe Photoshop.
First, we need to bring in some elevation data. Elevation data is critical for creating shaded relief, as it determines how light and shadows will behave in different parts of the map. We can obtain high-resolution digital elevation models (DEM) for our region from the USGS EarthExplorer.
Those of your familiar with spatial imagery data and DEMs will know that our first challenge will be working with tiled (discontinuous) imagery data products. In its raw form, DEMs are often stored as identically sized tiles, with each tile representing a specific indexed region of the earth’s surface. It is an unfortunate reality that many times the spatial extent of each DEM tile rarely matches the exact extent of the area you are interested in mapping. As a result, map-makers and spatial imagery specialists need to implement tools to import, merge, and crop these tiles to a more useful format and size.
In our case, the elevation data for the area shown by the original 1899 topo-map is now represented by four separate DEM tiles, with roughly one tile for each quadrant of the map. To handle this problem, we can use the powerful Advanced Import tool within the Geographic Imager toolbar. The tool is a one-stop solution to easily import and mosaic our DEM datasets directly into Photoshop, all while retaining the spatial awareness we need to georeference or transform our data layers.
By combining each of the four raw DEM datasets, the tool will mosaic the tiles into a single merged, continuous, and geographically accurate elevation layer covering the entire extent of the map. Even more impressive is that Geographic Imager can use the spatial referencing information in the data to automatically align and overlay the original 1899 topo map onto the elevation layer, removing the need to perform manual georeferencing. (If the imagery data you are using does not have spatial referencing information already, don’t worry – our support team has crafted some excellent, easy to follow georeferencing in Geographic Imager tutorials).
With our DEM data imported into Photoshop, we can start to explore different techniques for creating shaded relief. We will start by using the Terrain Shader tool located on the Geographic Imager toolbar. Terrain shader is a one-click technique to create simple shaded relief instantly. It allows you to configure the angle and intensity of the simulated illumination source to control the prominence and direction of casted shadows. Additionally, you can apply customized colour gradients to easily produce stylized elevation maps or apply hypsometric tints.
In many situations, the Terrain Shader tool is an all-in-one, quick and easy way to create shaded relief. The output of the tool makes it easy to distinguish topographic features and can be used to quickly produce a shaded-relief backdrop for your map.
One of the greatest benefits of using Geographic Imager is that we retain all the imagery manipulation and spatial referencing capabilities of a GIS while still having access to the massive inventory of powerful image editing tools provided by Photoshop. This allows us to take our shaded relief technique up a notch by incorporating the advanced 3D rendering and lighting tools of Photoshop 3D to truly bring our 1899 Grand Teton survey map to life.
To start, we first need to trim the DEM layer down to our specific area of interest. We used the GeoCrop tool to crop our mosaiced DEM layer down to the exact extent of our topo map (it is important that both layers are the exact same extent – you’ll see why later). Next, we can open up the Photoshop 3D toolbar, and convert our flat DEM into an extruded 3D “Depth Map”.
To enhance the shaded relief effect, we need to apply a vertical exaggeration to the model. In 3D mode, we can drag the z-axis scaling slider to exaggerate the prominence of the topographical features in our map. By creating vertical exaggeration, we can create more pronounced shaded relief, as canyons and lowlands will capture shadows more effectively.
In 3D mode, we can use the mouse cursor to pan and rotate our “camera” to get different perspectives of our elevation model. This can be useful for creating orthographic or oblique perspective map styles.
Now that we have a configured 3D model of our map area, we can apply our simulated illumination source. Much like the Terrain Shader tool, we can control the illumination intensity and angle of approach. Since we are working in a 3D environment however, we now have three different axes that control where our light is coming from. Notice how the angle is important for affecting the length and intensity of shadows in our relief map. This includes the prominent mountain silhouettes that can be created when we set the light source to approach from a low angle on the horizon.
Next, we can configure the surface properties and apply a texture overlay to our 3D model. Experimenting with these settings changes how light interacts with the surface and can be refined to produce different relief shading effects. Using these surface properties, we can also drape the original 1899 Topo map onto our surface model (this is why it is important for both the DEM and the topo-map to share the exact same extent, otherwise the topo map will be distorted once it is draped over the surface).
Fine-tuning the map at this stage can take some time and experimentation. We can add some additional light sources with different casting angles and intensity to help create a multi-directional hillshade effect. We can also configure the light settings to produce softer, less pronounced shadows that look more realistic. After spending some time adjusting the lighting and surface settings, as well as configuring the camera view angle, we can hit the “render” button and sit back while it creates a full-resolution rendering of our 3D model (this part can be very computationally intensive, and may require a high-performance machine to process efficiently).
Since we are still creating our map entirely within the Photoshop environment, we can immediately fine-tune the brightness, contrast, and colour of our map before exporting the final product.
You can see some renders of the final map below. Thanks to the powerful spatial import and manipulation tools of Geographic Imager, and the ability to work entirely within the advanced image editing environment of Photoshop, we were able to create a dramatic 3D shaded relief effect that brings our 1899 USGS Grand Teton Survey map to life.
We are proud to announce the start of a new video-focused blog series called Mapping Class. This blog series will curate tutorials and workflows created by cartographers and Avenza software users from around the world. We begin with a mapping workflow from Steve Spindler, a longtime MAPublisher user, and expert cartographer. He has shared with us his own take on creating Orthographic locator maps by applying some neat design tricks and utilizing MAPublisher’s powerful projection tools to create a simple, yet effective map.
Steve has produced a short video walkthrough demonstrating his process and has summarized the technique in the written article below.
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Creating Orthographic Locator Maps by Steve Spindler
An orthographic map is like a view from space. It’s useful for directing attention to someplace on the planet.
This video shows how an orthographic locator map is made in Illustrator using MAPublisher. The template illustrator file I use in the video is here.
We’ll start off by locating Paris on the map using Find Places. We need the latitude and longitude to create two projections.
Next, get the Latitude and Longitude from Map Attributes. You’ll have to turn MapX and MapY fields on. MapX is longitude. MapY is Latitude.
In Map Views, click on the projection, (ne_110m_land), and then select “Perform Coordinate System Projection”.
Select Projected Coordinate Systems and search for Azimuthal Equal Area. Duplicate, rename and set the definitions for the central meridian and the latitude of origin. There might be more than one. Pick one.
Select Projected Coordinate Systems and search for Orthographic. Duplicate, rename and set the definitions for the central meridian and the latitude of origin. There might be more than one. Pick one.
Select the new azimuthal projection, the one you created, and click OK to use it.
We use the azimuthal projection to crop data before creating the orthographic projection. Otherwise, there will be overlapping imagery. Next, create a buffer for the Paris point that is 10002.5 km around the point. This will be located on a new layer.
Use the path utilities tool to convert the bezier circle into polylines. Then reproject the map to the orthographic projection. Once completed, crop again with your circular buffer layer and delete the water layer. It will be replaced with a gradient.
Finally, add a radial gradient to the circular buffer layer and move the circle below the other layers.
Now you have an orthographic locator map that you can continue to style and label for your purposes.
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About the Author
Steve Spindler has been designing compelling cartographic pieces for over 20 years. His company, Steve Spindler Cartography, has developed map products for governments, city planning organizations, and non-profits from across the country. He also manages wikimapping.com, a public engagement tool that allows city-planners to connect and receive input from their community using maps. To learn more about Steve Spindler’s spectacular cartography work, visit his personal website. To see the original tutorial article, or view Steve’s other mapping demonstrations, visit cartographyclass.com
Maps are a fusion of art and science, presenting complex geographical data in a way that is both visually appealing and informative. Cartographers use maps to convey a story, drawing attention to important information using carefully crafted design choices and curated map elements that engage the viewer. Although cartographers employ a variety of specialised techniques to present this meaningful information on a map, one of the simplest, yet most effective methods is through map labels.
Quite simply, map labels are symbols or texts strategically placed at specific locations on a map to identify important geographical features, locations, or areas of interest. To a map viewer, labels are a quick and easy way to know exactly what is shown on a map. To a map maker, however, the task of creating labels is not often quick and generally isn’t easy. This is especially true when there are a large number of labels that need to be placed, or when labels need to follow complex paths such as roadways, rivers, or trails. Map-makers must also consider the issue of label crowding and collisions, ensuring labels are not overlapping each other, covering or distracting from other important features of the map. Combined, these challenges can be a significant time-sink in the map-making process, requiring both time and effort on the part of the cartographer.
Labelling doesn’t have to be difficult though, and in this blog, we will show you how built-in MAPublisher label tools and the MAPublisher LabelPro add-on can make labelling simple.
Let’s start with our unlabelled map. We have taken a collection of openly available geo-data depicting the small mountain town of Ouray, Colorado (home of National Geographic Cartographer and last month’s Avenza Cartographer Chronicles feature, Mike Boruta). We have stylized the data to show rivers, parks, streets and trails all throughout the town, but we feel labels would help a user to better understand the information being shown. We are going to approach the labelling process in a few different ways.
Manual Label Placement with the MAP Tagger Tool
For small labelling tasks, where a map maker might need to place only a handful of precisely located labels, the MAP Tagger tool is perfect for the job. MAP Tagger allows us to configure a basic set of options that control the character style of our label as well as general label placement rules. From there, we can simply click on a map feature and have the tool automatically detect and apply a label from attribute information contained in the selected layer. As we have direct control over the placement of every individual label, we can be extremely precise in choosing label placements that work for our map. Best of all, the tool automatically detects and applies text pathing for line features, meaning text labels can follow the form of any road, river, trail in your map!
When working with a small number of map features, the MAP Tagger tool is often just what you need to add well-placed labels to your map. For larger labelling tasks, such as our Ouray map, where there are many layers and several different features to be labelled, a manual approach such as this would be very time-consuming. Instead, we need to implement a more automated, batch labelling technique to speed-up the map-making process.
Batch label placement with the Label Features Tool
When you are working with several map layers, or have a large number of geographic features that each need to be labelled, it can be more efficient to create your labels all at once. The Label Features tool comes built-in with MAPublisher, and can handle batch labelling of map features with only a few clicks. The tool is designed similarly to MAP tagger, and automatically populates the map with precise, path-aligned labels, while offering the flexibility to define unique character styles for each map layer.
Taking a look at the tool, we were able to quickly generate over a hundred labels, for every road, trail, river, and park layer in our Ouray map. By nature, the tool will present you with a large number of labels for each feature, allowing us to examine and choose the labels we wish to retain and remove those that we don’t. With a little bit of clean-up to remove those extra or unwanted labels (see the animation below), we can already see our labelled map is coming together!
The Label Features tool is great for getting a head start on large labelling projects, but you might notice that the output of the labelling tool still requires some manual intervention to clean-up the output. For example, notice how “4th Street” and “5th Street” labels are repeated several times over the length of the street, with some labels colliding with others to create an overlap. This is a common problem in many labelling tasks and is due to the way our input data is structured. The dataset we obtained presents each road in the town as a line, but rather than present each road as a single continuous feature, it breaks up each street into several linked segments. Although this can be corrected with manual editing, it can still be time-consuming when working with a high number of labelled features. To avoid this, we need a method of achieving smarter batch label placement that can detect and reduce instances of label collision or redundancy.
Fortunately, we have one last trick up our sleeves that makes even the most complex labelling tasks a breeze. We can use MAPublisher LabelPro for collision-free, rules-based label placement.
Better Labelling with MAPublisher LabelPro
The MAPublisher LabelPro add-on allows the user to customize a wide variety of enhanced labelling options that result in smarter, more efficient label placement. LabelPro comes with a powerful purpose-built labelling engine that handles not only label placement, styling, and pathing, but also optimizes the grouping, fitting, and collision avoidance of labels to reduce crowding, avoid label overlap, and eliminate label redundancies.
Remember those overlapping labels we ran into with the Ouray map? With LabelPro we can set rules that treat street segments as contiguous features in a single line, meaning the labelling engine will efficiently place labels that are representative of the entire street, rather than just for each segment. The intelligent collision and fitting rules mean we can also prevent labels from overlapping each other or crowding the map, saving us time and effort by letting the tool handle precise label placement with minimal clean-up. By setting layer priorities designating certain layers as obstacles we can make sure our important labels are unobstructed, and other labels do not cross other features in a way that would confuse the map viewer.
With LabelPro, we can also create expressions to apply conditional character styles and rules based on attribute values in the data. In our map, we created label filters for “Residential Roads”, “Service Roads”, and “Alleyways”, allowing us to label (or not label) certain road types differently, even though they are all contained in the same “secondary roads” map layer. These are only a few examples of the robust collection of configurable rules and smart labelling options available to tackle even the most complex labelling tasks.
With our rules set up and all character styles defined, in very short order we could automatically generate labels for all rivers, roads, highways, parks and trails in our Ouray map. The smart placement with LabelPro means we spend less time manually correcting label placement and allows us to produce maps more efficiently and easily. If you want to read a more in-depth, tutorial style article that shows you the exact steps we used to easily create our simple map of Ouray, check out this great workflow article produced by our support team – Here!
Data sources: All datasets were obtained from OpenStreetMap and the Ouray County Open Data portal.
