Tom Patterson: “Right now is the golden age of cartography.”

Very Expensive Maps

Leesburg cartographer Tom Patterson on his decades creating visitor maps for the National Park Service (there’s a good chance his work is crumpled in your glovebox), learning to draw terrain by corresponding with an artist in Scotland, why he doesn’t lament the passing of 70s-era production techniques, how to map a piedmont glacier using satellite imagery, convincing the Park Service to give away their map files (then making it happen himself during a rained-out vacation), why he releases his designs into the public domain, how “pretty map” used to be an insult, preferring modern maps over antiques, and how “right now is the golden age of cartography.” See his work at shadedrelief.com

• Malaspina Glacier panorama
• NPS Grand Canyon panorama
• NPS Grand Canyon cartogram
• NPS map design files: find a park map, choose “Adobe print production ZIP file”
• Seafloor map of Hawaii
• Shaded Relief Archive, has a bunch of his pencil reliefs
• Swisstopo
• Natural Scene Designer
• MAPublisher
• Geographic Imager
• QGIS
• ArcMap
• Eduard
• Natural Earth Data
• Becca Holdeusen
• Alex Fries
• Daniel Huffman
• John Nelson
• Jake Coolidge
• Heinrich Berann
• Hal Shelton
• Tibor Toth
• Marie Tharp
• Mike Hall
• Jeff Clark
• Sarah Bell
• Anton Thomas
• Alex McPhee
• Nathaniel Kelso

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