Here at Avenza, we love finding interesting data and using it to create engaging maps. In this blog, we show you how we used the powerful spatial data manipulation and cartographic styling tools found in MAPublisher for Adobe Illustrator to create an infographic exploring how park visitor patterns changed in the United States in 2020 using a truly interesting openly available dataset.
Recently, Google made its COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports public. These reports use aggregated anonymous mobile GPS data to explore how global human activity patterns in specific location categories (parks, retail, transit, residential, workplaces, and grocery) changed as a result of the ongoing pandemic. The U.S. dataset is massive, containing estimates of daily visitor activity for each location category in every county. Each data point provides an estimate of that day’s percentage increase or decrease in visitors relative to a pre-pandemic baseline period, meaning the data reflects how pandemic restrictions on that day may have impacted park space usage in that specific location. Below shows a sample of the raw dataset, listing five data points covering Feb 15-19th activity patterns in a single Colorado county.
We downloaded the complete dataset (February to November 2020) from Google’s mobility reports data portal. The dataset contains nearly 900,000 records of all 3,143 counties in the U.S. We wanted our infographic to focus on the parks category, which includes every national, state, and local park, as well as public forests, campgrounds, beaches, marinas, dog parks, and gardens. Using the open-source statistical programming language R, we were able to aggregate the dataset into a more manageable size. Below, you can see how some basic filtering of these “cleaned” datasets already shows evidence of some interesting patterns, but we felt that mapping the dataset would be much more engaging.
Maps are powerful story-telling tools, and we felt this data would be more interesting if you could see how park visitor patterns changed not only with time but also with geography. To make working with map data in Adobe Illustrator easier, we used the MAPublisher Import tool to load in a shapefile of U.S. state boundaries. The tool allows us to treat our dataset as a fully functional graphic element in Illustrator while still retaining all geographic properties integral to spatial data (attributes, topology, and coordinate systems).
To visualize the data as a map, we needed a way to associate each record in our tabular dataset to a specific location (in this case, a State). To do this, we used the Join tool, which takes our “cleaned” tabular parks dataset (stored as a CSV file), and links it to our mapped states shapefile using the shared State names column.
We started to think about how to design the layout of the infographic (this is where having a mapping environment in Illustrator really shines). We wanted it to consist of three main parts: a large labelled map showing the average change in park visits over the entire year; a vertical series of maps showing how park visits varied month to month; and a handful of pop-out maps with insets highlighting specific points in the year and specific regions of the country.
We chose to stylize the data into thematic maps, which use colour to represent specific values in the data at different locations. Instead of tediously configuring individual colour fills, we used MAP Themes to establish a rules-based stylesheet that applies a colour automatically to each State based on the monthly park visitor columns stored in the map layer’s attribute table. We chose a “thematic map” colour group from the included ColorBrewer 2 swatch library to best show positive and negative changes in park usage.
Next, we populated our main map with labels showing the percentage change in park use for each state. As many cartographers know, placing and configuring labels can be a significant time sink. Fortunately, we could use the MAPublisher LabelPro add-on to provide collision-free, rules-based label placement. We could configure the label rules to automatically handle collisions, alignment, and placement of labels for each state. Using the leader lines option in the LabelPro Rules panel, we were even able to create offset labels that prevent crowding the map.
Finally, we decided that to create some insets to highlight specific parts of the country. From a “master” map, we used the Crop to Shape tool to crop the map data to our desired inset extents. Using Crop to Shape is quick, and also retains the styling elements (colours, labels, strokes), topology, and attribute integrity of the cropped map layers.
With most of the maps completed, all that was left was to populate the infographic with text and graphics. Using the MAPublisher layout tools, we added a functional North Arrow and customized the automatically generated legend layer to suit our infographic’s design. Lastly, we used an Illustrator graph tool to create a vertical line graph of park activity along the left side of the infographic.
Presenting the dataset in this way makes it much easier to extract insights and craft a story from the data. Some patterns are immediately noticeable, such as the overall increase in park space usage that is observed for most of the US during the pandemic period. This isn’t exactly unexpected, as parks were one of the most accessible forms of leisure activity and recreation amid widespread social distancing and retail/entertainment closures. We also see how state-specific factors may have affected park usage in different regions of the country at different times. Some states, such as South Dakota, had eased restrictions on out-of-state visitors to their park systems, resulting in a spring season surge in park usage earlier than their neighbours. Conversely, states which typically draw a high proportion of international tourists, such as California, Hawaii, and Florida, saw more of a decrease in average park usage as a result of global air travel decline. These patterns and stories are one of many that can be identified, providing compelling examples of why maps are such powerful tools for visualizing data.
The beauty of working with MAPublisher to create this map-heavy infographic is that we were able to implement the powerful mapping and data manipulation tools of a dedicated GIS while seamlessly integrating the advanced art and design tools offered by the Adobe Illustrator graphical environment. Together, these tools turned what would have been a complex workflow of importing and exporting data between different software, and allowed us to create the entire infographic in a single mapping and design-focused fully integrated workspace.
Toronto, ON, December 14, 2020 – Avenza Systems Inc., producers of the Avenza Maps® app for mobile devices and geospatial plug-ins for Adobe Creative Cloud, including Geographic Imager® for Adobe Photoshop®, is pleased to announce the release of MAPublisher® 10.7 for Adobe Illustrator®.
This MAPublisher release improves on continued compatibility with Adobe Illustrator 2021 and macOS Big Sur. Product licensing improvements include a new Cloud floating license for easier setup for both admin and end-users. “Over the past several quarters, we have geared ourselves up for some major enhancements and have been working closely with our product partners at Adobe,” said Ted Florence, President of Avenza. “We’ve learned a lot and are continuously exploring more product features in the latest Adobe releases to bring them to our community of mapping professionals.”
Enhancements and new features of MAPublisher 10.7
Compatible with Adobe Illustrator 2021 on Mac and Windows
Compatible with macOS 11 Big Sur
Access Floating licenses from the Cloud
User interface and usability enhancements
MAPublisher 10.7 is immediately available free of charge to all current MAPublisher users with active maintenance and as an upgrade for non-maintenance users starting at US$599. New licenses are available from US$1399. MAPublisher FME Auto and MAPublisher LabelPro are also available as add-ons starting at US$399. Academic, floating, and volume licences are also available. Prices include one year of full maintenance. Visit www.avenza.com/mapublisher for more details.
More about Avenza Systems Inc.
Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools to make better maps. In addition to desktop mapping software, Avenza offers the mobile Avenza Maps app to sell, purchase, distribute, and use maps on iOS and Android devices. For more information, visit www.avenza.com.
Plan to attend the 34th WLIA Annual Conference, which will now take place virtually during the week of February 15-19, 2021.
The WLIA is planning an exceptional annual conference experience — an event that will provide workshop learning opportunities, exceptional educational content, networking opportunities, a focus on sponsors and exhibitors, special interest group gatherings, the map contest, words from expert keynote speakers, and much more.
Avenza is representing Canada with its mapping solutions to help in forest fire fighting and prevention in Brazil and will be connecting with experts on how to best use Avenza technology for firefighting and forestry. This event is organized by Global Affairs Canada
Avenza will be presenting information about desktop and mobile mapping solutions at the Oil and Gas Summit (virtual event) on November 19, 2020.
About this event
The III Oil and Gas Summit: “Visions of a new reality” is the most important event of the oil and gas industry in Colombia, which for the first time will bring together the main players in the sector in a 100% digital environment. For three days, attendees will be able to participate in five virtual spaces: Academic Agenda, Technical Agenda, Regional Agenda, Business Fair and Business Roundtable. It is expected to have more than 3,500 participants.
This event is organized by the Petroleum Trade Union Committee (CGP) made up of the Colombian Petroleum Association (ACP), the Colombian Chamber of Oil, Gas and Energy (Campetrol), the Colombian Association of Petroleum Engineers (Acipet), the Colombian Association of Petroleum Geologists and Geophysicists (ACGGP) and the Colombian Association of Engineers (ACIEM).
In this edition, Geo Oil Energy will be part of the most important Business Fair in the sector in Colombia and the third in Latin America that will take place in a completely digital and interactive ecosystem, in line with the latest technology trends worldwide, which guarantee an innovative experience.
The visual portrayal of quantitative and qualitative data is a process that requires the right tools. You want your audience to be able to make sense of the data you are sharing and be able to weave that data into a compelling and inspiring story. Here is how Avenza MAPublisher and Geographic Imager assisted Robert Simmon, Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Planet.
Robert isn’t your typical data visualization engineer who had formal training in scientific graphic design or cartography. His passion and interest in computer graphics and a master’s degree in materials science gave him the technical skills to start turning numbers into pictures that eventually helped him communicate with research scientists in his professional career.
Robert’s stepping stone into the fields of cartography, design, and data visualization happened during his work at NASA, where one of his first projects was creating a CD-ROM that would allow students and the interested public to explore a global ozone dataset. During his work there, he began to realize that the graphics published and used by NASA were made more for other scientists than for a broad audience. He also realized that good design was a powerful tool to improve communication. So, he tried to re-create scientific graphics in a more user-friendly form, with mixed success. “It wasn’t until I attended a talk by a popular lecturer on visualization that I learned there was a theory behind good design, and a big lightbulb went off in my head,” says Robert. “I began to read everything I could get my hands on about design, data visualization, and cartography—particularly map projections and the use of colour to encode information, since so much visualization at NASA revolved around satellite remote sensing data, which is quantitative and inherently geospatial.”
Eventually, Robert went on to found the Earth Observatory to share the breadth of NASA’s Earth science research with the interested public. After more than a decade with NASA, he received the chance to join the exciting startup—Planet—and work with an unprecedented, high-resolution, global dataset.
Robert developed a fairly unconventional workflow centred around Adobe design tools rather than GIS or scientific visualization software. This is where the Geographic Imager plugin for Adobe Photoshop and MAPublisher plugin for Adobe Illustrator proved invaluable to bridge the gap between data and visualization.
Today, Robert’s day-to-day work largely revolves around processing visible and near-infrared imagery. Every image he works with gets imported into Photoshop with Geographic Imager. Creating maps in Adobe has proven to be effective and highly efficient as software like Adobe Photoshop possess powerful colour-correction tools, fast previews, layers, high bit-depth support, and undo history options.
This aids highly competent visualizers to work seamlessly and flexibly until an image is made perfect. Robert uses Geographic Imager to merge multiple adjacent image scenes or align a time series to make an animation (even if they’re in different projections), all with a single “import” step. He then exports the file as a GeoTIFF, so the image can later be combined with other, complementary data.
Although Robert enjoys working with imagery, he has had the most fun combining multiple data sources, especially raster and vector. Delving into his design workflow a bit deeper, he involves both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator together. In Adobe Photoshop/Geographic Imager he works on the initial colour work and crops his desired map extents, then imports it into Illustrator/MAPublisher to overlay with vector data and create masks. “It’s particularly useful to be able to crop the imported vector data to match the area of interest, rather than having to manually select and delete objects that lie outside the Illustrator artboard,” says Robert. After setting up his vector layers, he then exports them as a layered Photoshop file and re-combines them with the original raster imagery, to ensure pixel-perfect accuracy.
Robert’s love for MAPublisher goes back to 2006 when he first used it to make maps with Landsat data. He used MAPublisher to create a water mask with ZIP code data, which was the only data source he could find with high enough resolution to accurately capture the jutting piers of lower Manhattan. Robert also used MAPublisher to create a map of Amazonia (one of his personal favourites from his portfolio) with the help of MAPublisher’s powerful attribute tools, which allowed him to select and merge data vector data of Amazon biome, distinct from the Political Amazon, for which data is readily available. He continued to create variations on this theme at Planet, including a map of the vegetation of Germany. It was derived from a Planet Surface Reflectance Basemap and given context with Natural Earth boundary, urban area, and transportation data.
Robert continues to tweak his colour palette for his vegetation maps since just being ‘good enough’ has never really been his forte.
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In collaboration with Robert Simmon, Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Planet.
Toronto, ON, October 21, 2020 – Avenza Systems Inc., producers of the Avenza Maps® app for mobile devices and geospatial plugins for Adobe Creative Cloud®, including MAPublisher® for Adobe Illustrator®, is pleased to announce the release of Geographic Imager® 6.2. This latest version is powered by Adobe’s new Unified Extensibility Platform (UXP), which provides tremendous performance and user interface improvements to the Geographic Imager plugin for Adobe Photoshop.
“Geographic Imager has become a product many organizations trust and depend on to quickly edit and process spatial imagery,” said Ted Florence, President of Avenza Systems. “With increased performance and even more opportunities to develop new tools and experiences with UXP, the possibilities are endless.”
Powering the Geospatial Imagery Editing Process
Geographic Imager for Adobe Photoshop® delivers an all-encompassing solution to import, edit, and export geospatial images such as aerial and satellite imagery. Work with digital elevation models, GeoTIFFs, and other popular GIS image formats while using Adobe Photoshop® features such as transparencies, filters, cropping and image adjustments; all while maintaining georeferencing and support for hundreds of coordinate systems and projections.
New features of the Geographic Imager 6.2 plugin for Adobe Photoshop® include:
Compatibility: Fully compatible with Adobe Photoshop® 2021 on both Windows and Mac, powered by Adobe’s new Unified Extensibility Platform (UXP)
Exporting: Vector map data is now able to export to many industry geospatial formats
Advanced Importing: Ability to remove backgrounds from images during import
Geographic Imager is immediately available and free of charge to all current Geographic Imager Maintenance Program members and starts at US$319 for non-maintenance upgrades. New fixed licenses start at US$699. Geographic Imager Basic Edition licenses start at US$99. Academic, floating and volume license pricing is also available.
For more information, visit www.avenza.com/geographic-imager.
More about Avenza Systems Inc.
Avenza Systems Inc. is an award-winning, privately held corporation that provides cartographers and GIS professionals with powerful software tools to make better maps. In addition to desktop mapping software, Avenza offers the mobile Avenza Maps app to sell, purchase, distribute, and use maps on iOS and Android devices. For more information, visit www.avenza.com.
For further information contact: 416-487-5116 – info@avenza.com – www.avenza.com
Join the Avenza Maps team for a social night of drinks, fun trivia, and roundtable discussion on our perspectives of building and working with mobile map technology for the past decade including what upcoming features and tools we’re currently working on, and where we might see the mobile mapping industry going in the future. Drop in to listen, chat, and ask questions about our products and how we’re building them for our users. We’re also celebrating the 10th anniversary of Avenza Maps and we’ll be giving away an Avenza Maps Pro license to a lucky trivia winner!
Bob has been working with and helping create features in the Avenza Maps app and develops partnerships that complement the platform. He has a Hon. BA in Geography and Political Science from the University of Toronto and is an Applications Specialist graduate from Fleming College.
Tristan Lyttle – Product Operations Lead
Tristan has been responsible for managing many aspects of Avenza Maps, including forming new partnerships, building features, and growing the Map Store. He has a Hon. B.Sc. in Physical Geography from Brock University and a degree in Geomatics from Niagara College.
Michael Law – Marketing Manager
Michael is a GIS professional, cartographer, and author turned marketing specialist to drive engagement for Avenza products. He has a Hon. BA in Urban Geography from the University of Toronto and is a Cartographic Specialist graduate from Fleming College.
Have you designed a beautiful map that is worthy of showing? Enter our map competition for a chance to compete against other cartographers and mapping professionals and have your work featured in our map gallery. The competition consists of two categories: Open and Student, with two sets of exciting prizes. The deadline for submissions is December 3 (5pm EST), 2021.
Maps from all industries are encouraged to enter. Some of the various map themes are (but are not limited to): thematic, topographic, recreation and tourism, land and asset management, planning and design, natural resources, health care, analysis, education, economic and commerce, and public safety.
For full competition details and to submit your map, go to the competition page here, or visit avenza.com/map-competition/
