A collection of older posts from the Axis Maps blog. These are kept here for reference and are no longer actively maintained.
October 14, 2019 · Andy Woodruff
This is a companion post to my NACIS 2019 Practical Cartography Day talk, in which there’s not enough time to say anything practical. If you’ve arrived here after seeing the slides, I hope you’re…
May 6, 2019 · Andy Woodruff
Although the original watercolor map is made of pre-rendered tiles, instricate raster map rendering on the fly in a browser is gradually becoming practical as Canvas becomes more capable, and…
March 26, 2019 · David Heyman
Recently, we’ve been partnering with Hammerhead to design offline maps for their on-bike cycling computer. It’s been really interesting to work on a design project where size concerns (all the data…
March 19, 2019 · Andy Woodruff
Continuing recent themes of working with elevation data —but stepping back to something more in the realm of ordinary cartography—over on Observable we've got a notebook going through some processes…
December 31, 2018 · Andy Woodruff
Most of my cartographic side projects these days follow a theme: mapping elevation data in some way or another. In the past year that has included wading into some 'traditional' waters—trying some…
September 24, 2018 · David Heyman
This post originally ran on the Ordnance Survey Blog .
June 26, 2018 · David Heyman
TL;DR Go here if you want the instructions without the extended bit about parenting.
May 17, 2018 · Andy Woodruff
Try it at home! Satisfaction guaranteed!
April 25, 2018 · Andy Woodruff
A short while ago we received an inquiry about making a tool to draw a simple topographic contour map of any given place in the world and export an SVG file with the lines. There are good global…
March 28, 2018 · David Heyman
We recently got to work with a professional testing company on one of our larger projects and I was blown away by how they handled front-end testing. My approach to front-end testing was always 'bang…
March 2, 2018 · Ben Sheesley
imagineRio , produced with the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, is one of our most ambitious digital humanities projects. It tracks changes in the development of Rio de Janeiro over the…
September 4, 2017 · Andy Woodruff
We faced a challenge along the above lines earlier this year when we set out to visualize usage of rotavirus vaccines produced by Merck. Simple-sounding on the surface, it involved some tricky design…
June 10, 2016 · David Heyman
About 4 years ago we wrote a post about setting up a map server with Mapnik and PostGIS . It's still one of the most popular posts on the site but it's VERY OLD. I wanted to update it with a slightly…
May 13, 2016 · Ben Sheesley
Ever since the San Francisco map sold out over the holidays we’ve been eager to get it reprinted and back up for sale. Of course, before doing so, we couldn’t resist making a few changes to refresh…
October 2, 2012 · Andy Woodruff
Sometime around 2006, when everyone and their grandma started cranking out terrible Google Maps mashups, the Cartography world soiled its collective underpants as it looked like the once specialized…
September 2, 2012 · David Heyman
I often get emails from recent geo-grads or new professional students asking something like: