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 54 minutes
episode 15: Jane Crosen: “I thought ‘Well, I’m going to do my own labels using calligraphy, and then I can be my own typesetting machine.’”
Penobscot, Maine mapmaker Jane Crosen discusses her 40+ year cartographic career, the sound advice of “when in doubt, leave it out,” creating spoof maps for the nautical market, producing two expanded and rearranged editions of George Colby's 1881 atlases of Downeast Maine counties, becoming “[her] own typesetting machine” with a calligraphy pen, the feeling of looking through an airplane window at the landscape she’s drawn so many times, and her “paste-up” map design process that...
episode 14: Jug Cerović: “The map is the reality; the infrastructure is entirely virtual.”
Madrid architect and mapmaker Jug Cerović discusses the transit cartographer’s ability to shape reality, drawing hundreds of bus lines by hand, mapping first and visiting later, installing guerrilla maps in his hometown of Belgrade, organizing a new map conference, helping Apple create a good public transit layer, and how seeing Istakhri’s 1,100-year-old maps will make one feel like a tyro. See his work at jugcerovic...
episode 13: Jeff Murray: “The slogan within my work is ‘look closer.’”
Somerset pen-and-ink artist Jeff Murray discusses sketching across the world during his ski bum years, selling his first print off a folding table in New Zealand, drawing in ten-hour chunks, the joy of selling art out of a gazebo, why he works at the continental scale, playing with perspective, his two hand-painted globes, and the choice words people have when his hyper-detailed maps don’t include their particular landmark. See Jeff's work at jeffmurray.co...
episode 12: Carl Churchill: “Immersing myself in thousands of high quality maps allowed me to develop a certain style.”
Union City cartographer and Wall Street Journal graphics editor Carl Churchill talks his map vocation and EDM avocation, spending two weeks on an elaborate wildflower-detection remote sensing script before an editor (correctly) tossed it, making fantasy maps with GIS tools, what drum loops taught him about radar interferometry, why "get paid to do what you love" will make you fall out of love, and how you can make beautiful maps with a good inspo board, a tolerance for academic...
episode 11: Elliot Park: “Why would you want to create a relief map you can’t touch?”
Columbia designer, illustrator, artisan and country songwriter Elliot Park on his ten year quest to hydraulically press a good map into good materials. Discussed: the lack of texture in today’s stuff, moving from DEM to CNC to a big beautiful copper/leather map, learning by (expensive) trial, the quest for a leather globe, and the challenge of creating lasting art that’s meant to be touched. See his leather and copper maps at columbiapressworks...
episode 10: Kirsten Sparenborg: “I elaborate on the emotion of places when I make maps.”
Tacoma map artist and chorographer Kirsten Sparenborg discusses her huge body of work in ink and watercolor, her years in architectural illustration, an ill-starred mural commission, making her own pigments out of local rocks, and her next 10-panel 46 sq. ft. project. See her work at turnofthecenturies.com
- New Orleans watercolor block map
- 3x3 ft...
episode 9: Aurélien Boyer-Moraes: “The most important part is that the map goes to the public, it’s useful, and it’s used.”
Lisbon transit cartographer and designer Aurélien Boyer-Moraes talks learning to use a computer at 19, creating his first 3x4 ft. transit map of an imagined Brazilian city after reading Jacques Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics cover-to-cover, preempting Google Street View in Lyon with his 6x6 Seagull camera, ten years of designing transit maps for French cities with Attoma, and his heavily-annotated collection of 2,100 transit and city maps (which he might let you see someday...
episode 8: Bill Marsh: “There’s something really useful about seeing the whole thing in one sweep, in great detail, all at once.”
Philadelphia cartographer and New York Times graphics editor Bill Marsh describes his 30-year project to map his adopted city, his collection of hyper-dense axonometric maps, getting the Philadelphia Inquirer to chopper a photographer over the city for him, and the bygone days of hand-inked editorial maps (an early project: illustrating the nuclear annihilation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.) You can buy his magisterial map of Philadelphia for $7 from https://store.philamuseum...
episode 7: Travis Folk: “Surely there are folks desirous of traditional cartography of a modern landscape.”
Green Pond wildlife biologist and map designer for New World Cartography discusses working with artist Tony Waters, radio-tracking northern bobwhites (quail) under the pines of the Conecuh National Forest, memorializing Aldo the Llewellin Setter on a map of game birds, and agreeing to a 9x14-ft project before knowing exactly how to uh, install a 9x14-ft project (it turned out great). See Folk’s maps at newworldcartography...
episode 6: Alex McPhee: “I love watching over people’s shoulders as they interact with what I do.”
Val Marie independent cartographer Alex McPhee describes learning to create enormous reference maps, his pre-mapping road trips, rural Saskatchewanians’ surprise in finding every train station on his provincial map (they didn’t believe him), how cartographers need to observe people interacting with their maps, and how nothing sells 3x5-ft maps like a radio interview. See his work at awmcphee...