You get what you pay for: professional cartographer Evan Applegate interviews better cartographers. Listen to the best living mapmakers describe how they create worlds in pixels, ink, graphite, threads, film, paint, ceramic, wood and metal. For show notes and bonus content visit https://veryexpensivemaps.com
https://veryexpensivemaps.com
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 13 hours 24 minutes
episode 44: Stephen Walter: “Maps are inherently political if they’re interesting.”
London artist and mapmaker Stephen Walter on two decades of drawing and painting “the semiotic residues of humankind,” an invitation to map an Ivorian national park (and why you should wait for the dry season before attempting this), approaching six years of work on an NYC map, interpreting Michael Drayton’s 17th c. topographical poem Poly-Olbion into a 6x5 ft...
episode 43: John Tauranac: “I seldom think macroscopically; I think microscopically.”
Manhattan writer and cartographer John Tauranac on his first maps of Midtown’s pedestrian passages, a public debate with Massimo Vignelli (“His geography was egregious”), working at a very different MTA (they used to have an aesthetics committee?), the “no improvements” made to the subway map since he chaired the 1979 MTA map committee, guiding Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s helicopter photo surveys of Manhattan, walking every block and learning Illustrator to create his acclaimed 176-page Manhattan...
episode 42: Andrew Middleton: “There’s something poetic about running a map store.”
In early 2023 GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton saw a tweet about Andy Nosal’s search for someone to take over The Map Center, Nosal's map shop in Pawtucket, RI; six months later Middleton left California to move into one of the last map retail stores in the U.S...
episode 41: Lionel Portier: “What I'm trying to convey with my maps is the pleasure of seeing beautiful things.”
Lyonnais illustrator and designer Lionel Portier on a mapmaking career that spans 30 years and five continents, accepting any map challenge an art director might conceive, a travel magazine gig that led to an Australian passport, painting 100 birds for a wetland park, his favorite territory to illustrate, spending three months on a 3x4-ft. map of Bruges, why he never carries a sketchbook on a walk, and conveying with his maps the “pleasure of seeing beautiful things...
episode 40: Isaac Dushku: “A map has to evoke a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home.”
Utah artist Isaac Dushku on how a map has to evoke either a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home, the best- and worst-selling states in his catalog (he drew all 50), taking his business Lord of Maps from being ghosted on Facebook Marketplace to supporting his family, creating a board book of America’s highest peaks with a “ridiculously complicated” printing process, why your choice of labels will always upset someone, somewhere, and how if someone enjoys mountains these maps will “fit...
episode 39: Sam Usle: “Slowly but surely we’re starting to recover the built environment.”
Urbanist and illustrator Sam Usle on designing human-scale communities and rendering them in watercolors, why theme parks reflect a yearning for human-scale towns, redesigning part of his high school campus before graduation, why you can thank Le Corbusier for hideous Revit-default cities, the axonometric map that sold Disneyland, storytelling with facades, the history of Rome’s urban fabric, why master planning begins with the negative space, and how “you'd be hard-pressed to find an...
episode 38: Naomi Rosenberg: "Get out of your sighted bubble.”
Naomi Rosenberg, assistant director of the Media and Accessible Design Lab at San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind, discusses the art of making fingertip-readable maps: why clutter is the enemy of good tactile maps, the quest for an affordable embosser, being locked to 24 pt...
episode 37: Matthew Dean Shaffer: “My approach is to try and be as accurate as possible.“
New Haven architectural designer and artist Matthew Dean Shaffer on balancing accuracy with art, taking a break from straight lines to draw birds, software-driven homogeneity in American architecture (“Straight-out-of-Revit, as we say”), why he draws the vegetation last, how anything’s better for the urban fabric than a surface parking lot, and sacrificing for one’s maps (he went cross-eyed for a day after a marathon drawing session)...
episode 36: Jamshid Kooros: “These maps are based on walking, walking, walking.”
Arlington “reformed architect” and pictorial cartographer Jamshid Kooros discusses his 30 years of mapmaking based on photographs, sketching and “walking, walking, walking,” the end of the drop-in pitch, turning three-week hikes into maps of French cities and castles, doing his own paper engineering for a pop-up map of Washington D.C...
episode 35: David Kulbeth: “It's taken so long to get everything just right because there's no guidebook to this.”
Stafford cartographer and entrepreneur David Kulbeth on reviving old map aesthetics with his digital-to-copperplate-to-print-to-watercolor technique, the (costly) difference between copperplate etching and engraving, finding a custom papermaker, keeping his art affordable, finding style inspiration in 12 moving boxes of cartography books, and making high-craft maps of “modern places in an antique style.” See his work at columbuscartography...