A Few Minor Niceties

I recently finished up a first draft of a piece for a client, a map that gave me a chance to try some new things and also exercise some cartographic muscles that I haven’t for a while. So, today, I wanted to just highlight a few interesting odds and ends that came up during the process. First off, here’s a look at the preliminary map, a 36×24-inch poster. It’s still in need of some quality checks, so I’ve shared it at a lower resolution, since it’s not really ready for circulation. Let’s dive in, starting with the relief. Shaded Relief Since this is such a large map, people will tend to interact with it at two different distances. They’ll see it from far away (such as when it’s across the room, hung on a wall), and they’ll also stand quite close to it (for actual reading of labels). The problem is that those two situations require different shaded reliefs. For example, here’s a relief that has the right level of detail for close-in reading. But, it looks rather flat and messy when we…