Canadian excellence: if you're after a wall/trail map of British Columbia, you need to see @ClarkGeomatics He just released the 3x2 ft. "Essential Geography of Vancouver Island," all printed and inspected by the author.

Time to scroll around the most beautiful map ever made: the 1739 "Plan de Turgot," commissioned by the chief merchant of Paris. Every mark was originally engraved into brass plates and the detail is insane, like examining an 8x10 ft. banknote.

“Handmade maps in the digital world” is my bailiwick, here are 23 modern map artisans: @ClarkGeomatics Jeff Clark completed a 100-layer 18-month project to map the Salish Sea. @MtnMapper Tom Patterson spent decades mapping for the National Park Service, still releases a banger map every few months AND releases his design files to the public domain. @DonatasBruzas Donatas Bružas is working on an engraving-style 3 ft. globe, makes custom typefaces and the most beautiful computer-mediated hachures you’ve ever seen. @JapanMapping Markus Hauser, trained in Switzerland with decades of experience, makes the best trail maps of Japanese wilderness. @FleischerHannes Hannes Fleischer wanted an old-school pen plotter map, so he lathed and milled his own parts to build the plotter, wrote custom scripts to turn DEMs into hachures, and designed the map with turfjs. Henrik Jonasson made an acre-sized handmade topo map of Sweden tiles.calazoffice.biz/#65567… hkartor.se/ Mike Hall’s incredibly thick reference maps (he draws his own coastlines) thisismikehall.com/europe Dave Imus’s 5 ft. wide maps of the U.S. imusgeographics.com/ Alex McPhee’s 6 ft. maps of Canadian provinces pronghornmaps.com/saskatchew… Andrew Lynch spent years tracking down every NYC rail siding vanshnookenraggen.com/_index… Nat Slaughter spent two years walking Central Park to make this central park map davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet… Aaron Taveras’s stunning trail maps of the Pacific Northwest cartografix.co/ Daniel Huffman’s 3 ft. map of Michigan somethingaboutmaps.com/Landf… Carl Churchill’s pitch-perfect relief maps in Imhof style flickr.com/photos/cchurchili… Bill Marsh’s 30-year project to map Philadelphia store.philamuseum.org/philad… Eric Knight’s Nat Geo panoramas ericknightmaps.com/panoramas Marty Schnure’s wilderness maps martyschnure.cargo.site/cart… Margot Dale Carpenter’s landform maps for publishing hartdalemaps.com/ Jamie Robertson’s trail maps of Big Sky country cairncarto.com/product/publi… Mike Hermann’s Pennsylvania trail maps purplelizard.com/ Maddy Grubb’s Blender maps of mountains maddygrubbmaps.github.io/Map… John Tauranac learned Illustrator and walked every block in Manhattan to make his own guide maps johntauranac.com/tauranac_s_… Eleanor Lutz is a bio PhD and taught herself how to make all kinds of maps of earth, sky and everything in between eleanorlutz.com/animated-sea…

WWII editorial maps for Time Magazine by R.M. Chapin

My favorite editorial map: north-down Nile by Laris Karklis for an Oct. 2020 Washington Post story about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Devon, U.K. artist Victoria Rose Richards embroiders rich territories. "I am surrounded by inspiration for my pieces in the endless fields and meadows, lush forests, winding rivers and reaching moorland."

Marine Le Breton draws swirling pen maps of France’s coastal areas and islands; you rarely see a map where the water gets as much ink as the land. Nautical love letters with towns, roads, marshes, tidal flats, creeks, bays, inlets, piers.

Margaret River, Australia cartographer Grant Preller walks the coast, surfs the breaks, then uses Google Earth, 1890s coastline maps, 1:50k topos, a pencil and CorelDraw to create 8-foot-wide maps that show where to catch a sick barrel 🤙 A true go-somewhere mapmaker

The Best Maps Lie Ahead I want my favorite material culture to live. I want people in 2130 to cherish a map made in 2030. I want to see another Turgot-level map produced before I die (pic related). In 1910 you could buy a 5-cent rail route pamphlet that looks better than nearly any map you can buy today. This couldn't be otherwise, considering who makes today’s maps: • Atlas cartographers: mostly gone, those who remain can’t pick colors (exception: @ClarkGeomatics @BenchmarkMaps ). • GIS managers: their job is to manage the sewer pipe database and make maps for 8.5x11" PDFs, can’t design or don’t have time. • Editorial cartographers: under tight deadlines, editors don’t care, art directors don’t know how to shape or commission nice maps (Exception: Laris Karklis, Carl Churchill). • Government cartographers: almost all GIS managers, the maps just gotta reflect the database, nobody cares how they look (exception: Anna Eshelman). • Nonprofit cartographers: too busy with GIS tasks, boss doesn’t care about nice maps. • Big tech cartographers: Google/Apple’s maps are database outputs, too constrained by people poking at the map to make them look nice (exception: Nat Slaughter). • Academic/critical cartographers: not rewarded for making nice maps, rewarded for writing recondite PDFs about maps. • Capital A Artists: too into deconstruction to make a sincere attempt (exception: Ido Michaeli). • Biz intelligence cartographers: who’s gonna cherish a bunch of hex bins and choropleths? Everyone likes old maps because olde timey cartographers started with a blank page and built up; the computer inverted this, letting you start with a cluttered page full of someone else's data and toss what you don’t want to show. So the computer grants insane leverage to mapmakers (drafter, illustrator, scriber, letterer, colorist, engraver used to be separate jobs) but at an aesthetic cost: 1) You have to actively fight your tools to make the map look like you care about how it looks (████ Esri) 2) A good map requires attention over every square inch. This was built into pre-computer maps because a cartographer couldn't make his/her marks without looking over every bit, but now it’s an extra step that no one’s getting paid for, so it's relatively rare. There are still dozens of excellent cartographers working today, on and off the computer. In my opinion the best contemporary mapmakers are commercial illustrators; they still start with a blank page, they care about gestalt and composition first, and they don't just affirm software's idea of what a map should look like. Cf. the work of @thisismikehall , Rodica Prato, Neil Gower, Kevin Sheehan, Alex Hotchin. What is to be done? Every beautiful map that makes you think "they don't make 'em like they used to": it can be made right now, and better. They had "time, strength, cash, patience," but while attenuated, those things are still around. A patron could pay an illustrator to walk around a city for years and draw every building he saw, like the Prévôt des Marchands of Paris did in 1734. The bad news is there is no living memory of this art, no old hands to teach how the past's rich maps were constructed. We start from scratch. The good news: we know exactly what to aim for. A time and money problem sounds tractable to me. The best maps of the future, computer-mediated or otherwise, will require 1) people who care enough to make them and 2) close-range instruction. Unfortunately there’s no building in the U.S. to combine those two, where the enthusiastic meet the skilled and learn to make beautiful maps. Formal cartographic education does not exist in America; I have a (free) M.S. in cartography and all of the looks-nice mapmaking I did was extracurricular. Today’s talented anglophone mapmakers taught themselves. The autodidacts are my favorite, but you shouldn't have to bootstrap your own training to make nice maps. I'm a pro cartographer and I learned the trade by sitting at Daniel Huffman’s elbow and asking 2 years of stupid questions. There's no substitute for sharing a desk with a great cartographer. This is solved with one building, a few million bucks and ten instructors, i.e. a school with a 1:1 instructor ratio, i.e. map apprenticeships. Provide a nice space for pro mapmakers to work, students with extant art/design chops pick their mentor do their scut work (shoving around thousands of labels is a rite of passage) and receive a bite of their mentor's project fees. The teacher gets a useful helper and thus can accept more ambitious projects. If you know a pile of money who wants the future to have great maps, tell them to DM me, I got plans. Pictured: 1739 Plan de Paris, commissioned by Prévôt des Marchands Michel-Etienne Turgot, an ~8x10 ft. print made from insanely detailed engravings, took six years to complete. Money-fine, enormous, you'd go blind before you counted all those trees someone had to scratch into brass...