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I’ve never been a terrain representation expert, but occasionally I get briefly super interested in some DIY technique for relief mapping, not using typical GIS tools or rendering software. Tom Patterson’s old (but still applicable) Photoshop tutorials were my introduction to the magic simplicity of turning a grayscale image into fancy shaded relief. Some years […]
over a year ago

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More from Cartogrammar

Seasonal relief

Just a map for fun, made without writing any code, which is a nice change of pace. I finally spent a bit of time catching up with the great Daniel Huffman’s excellent tutorial on creating shaded relief maps with Blender. Do try it out if you haven’t; he’s written it up thoroughly and helpfully, showing […]

over a year ago 33 votes
Camino de Santiago sketch maps

Back in October in Montréal I finished my term on the NACIS board of directors at the annual conference. (Side note: see video of the conference talks!) Tanya Buckingham (recent NACIS executive director, current candidate for local office) has always kindly handed out thank-you gifts to people who help with the meeting; this time it […]

over a year ago 34 votes
Beyond the Sea, flowing and exploding edition

Last year I took a whack at mapping what you’d “see” if you looked straight across the ocean from coastlines around the world. Since then, an interactive version of that has been a back-burner idea. Well, finally, here we go. To recap, these arcs represent straight-line paths out to sea, perpendicular to the coastline at […]

over a year ago 34 votes
The rain on terrain

If you poured water over the terrain somewhere in the world, where would it go? That’s perhaps one way to think of the thing that distracted me in the evenings this week. [Edit: an interactive map should appear here, but there are some unresolved issues. Check out the GitHub-hosted version for something at least partly […]

over a year ago 35 votes
Land by latitude and longitude, or, a pile of continents

Bill Rankin’s graphs of world population by latitude and longitude popped into mind for no particular reason the other day, followed by a silly-sounding question: “but, like, what about land area by latitude and longitude?” Silly because, duh, a chart of land area by latitude and longitude is a map. Then again, a map is […]

over a year ago 41 votes

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Ford and the Birth of the Model T

Ford’s status as a large-volume car producer began with the predecessor to the Model T: the Model N, a four-cylinder, two-seater car initially priced at $500. At the time, the average car in the US cost more than $2,000, and it seemed nearly unimaginable that a car with the capabilities of the Model N could cost so littl

23 hours ago 4 votes
Trash to Treasure: A New Orleans Culture Re-Creation Story

The many ways residents and local institutions worked to bring the Crescent City back after a historic natural disaster.

2 days ago 4 votes
The Other Stations (226 Garages and Service Stations, by Philip Butler)

Railway stations, bus stations and… filling stations? The first two have made frequent appearances on the pages of this website, the third far less often. Filling stations, and their close cousins garages and car showrooms, only occasionally attract significant architectural attention. Although it can happen from time to time (there’s a list of filling stations […]

4 days ago 12 votes
Did New Orleans Really Survive Katrina?

What almost happened instead…

4 days ago 10 votes
Reading List 08/23/25

Thermal energy storage, an adjustable allen wrench, the new race to the moon, the former world’s largest indoor water park, and more.

6 days ago 11 votes