Anything mashing up maps and typewriters is guaranteed to get my attention (I have 37 of the latter and rather a lot more of the former). So I have no choice but to share R. J. Andrews’s “Typewriter,” an elevation map of California created on a manual typewriter.
Created by layering combinations of nearly 2,500 keystrokes (I, H, X, and O) with a 1953 Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter on Masa 77gsm paper from Japan. Based on a California Albers projection at approximately 1:5,000,000 scale.
How do you depict elevation on a map of Mars? Earlier this year, Daniel Huffman posted a roundup of hypsometric tints for Mars.
I have a peculiar hobby of collecting Martian hypsometric tinting schemes: those sets of colors that cartographers use to depict elevations on the Red Planet. It’s a fascinating cartographic frontier. While the classic (and somewhat flawed) way of showing Earth’s elevations is to use a color scheme that starts with green lowlands, and then proceeds through some combination of brown/yellow/orange/red until it reaches white in the highest areas, there’s no standard yet for Mars. Maybe centuries from now, one of the schemes below will become that standard.
Huffman looks at fifteen schemes in total in the post, and in this video on YouTube:
Daniel Silva’s London Underground Depth Diagrams literally add another dimension to Tube maps: they show the elevation of each station platform relative to sea level and the ground level above. They’re available in PDF format and, naturally, are also being sold as posters. [Londonist]
Mapzen’s Peter Richardson takes us from elevation data to final shaded terrain map, showing us the steps taken to produce maps of mountainous terrain. [via]
