I am not a native English speaker, but I am wondering, why you call the printings "maps". Aren't they rather high resolution satellite images? Wikipedia defines a map as "a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes."[1]
And are your images really more detailled than cadastral maps (scale 1:1000) that are nowadays recording the location of a boundary stones with a maximum deviation of ±3 to 5 cm?
Our black and white images (such as the image on the linked article) aren't satellite images at all, they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade.
We do have some color images that use satellite imagery and the creation of those images is going to be the subject of my next post. We do things like remove the natural hillshade and apply our own (due to a quirk of human perception where sun coming from below causes terrain to be perceived as inverted) and blending images from different days, etc.
Re: is this really a "map?" That's a comment we get quite a bit, especially in FB comments on our ads. These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with.
Re: detail. It's all about the size of the area you are printing. Our world map uses 30-meter data, but you'd need to print it on the side of a building to see the limit to the detail. So in our sizes, using 3-5cm data wouldn't improve the maps, you wouldn't be able to see any of that detail. We only make maps if that is true.
> ... they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade.
> ... These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with.
Okay, that makes sense to a certain degree. Seems what you are doing is innovative enough that it deserves a new category of "map".
Have you considered transfering your methods from the macro to the micro world? If I understand it correctly, you could in principle inverse the zoom factors, like using the elevation model of a coin combined with texture data and a lighting model and printing a much larger version of it on a canvas.
These aren't simply photographs but they do seem to fall on the photographic, rather than the map, end of the scale. Raven Maps is a good source of (large) high quality maps that are more traditionally map-like--though some of theirs are pretty photographically oriented as well.
I have a controversial question for you...
let's say I order a map of India from India, would you give me a map with all the sections of the country intact (Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh) or would you give us a china approved section of India without Kashmir or bits of the east (like how google serves its maps)?
How do you manage to withhold or incorporate sketchy borders with geopolitical issues, or do you refrain from serving such locations altogether to avoid any backlash?
Your contiguous US-states map (and it seems many of your other maps, though not e.g. the North America map or the world map) uses a Mercator map projection: https://ramblemaps.com/continental-us-map
This is a reasonable choice for sailing charts (makes rhumb lines straight) and a reasonable choice for a zoomable web map of the world built around raster tiles (avoids the need for client-side reprojection), but is an uncommon – and in my opinion generally poor – choice for maps of the contiguous US states. What made you settle on that one? Or was it just the existing projection of the data, and you decided not to reproject it?
I think many of your maps would work a bit better (suffer substantially less distortion) if they used a region-specific projection. I have a long-term interest in map projections and would be happy to chat about possibilities if you have questions.
We settled on this choice after originally using alternate projections. The source data is not in mercator, we specifically reproject to mercator.
I don't disagree with you, I personally prefer other projections for many of our maps, but after the hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" we realized that people think of their state (and country, in the case of CONUS) in mercator, so we decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight.
For other countries, we tend to use locale specific projections.
One projection question for you, while we're chatting: do you have a favorite Asian projection? I wanted to center the projection on center mass, which would mean changing the poles, but couldn't figure that out!
> hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!"
Funny enough, when I see either the USA map or the California map in Mercator projection, the first thing that comes to mind is “wow the shape is completely wrong!” :-)
> favorite Asian projection?
Asia is huge, so you are necessarily going to get a lot of distortion of one kind or another. It’s a close-enough-to-circular blobby shape that you might be fine with some azimuthal projection. If you want to preserve local shapes but don’t mind variation in scale, you can use a stereographic projection centered roughly on the circumcenter. If you want to reduce distance errors while allowing a bit of local shape distortion, you could use an azimuthal equidistant projection.
(In either case, you could probably get away with either an assumed spherical earth, or you could properly correct for the ellipsoid. The difference between the two would not be too obvious at a glance.)
There are various other projections you could try. You might find one or another aesthetically better. For example perhaps some oblique conic projection would fit the region slightly better than the azimuthal projection. Or you could try something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projectio...
Here’s e.g. a nice comparison of some possible projections for Europe:
Thanks for the link. We used Lambert Conformal Conic for Europe and Robinson for Asia, but I'm not thrilled with the Asia projection.
I really want to be able to change the latitude the projection is centered on, but haven't been able to figure out how to move that point yet, so we've got more skew near the pole than we do at the bottom of the map. Feels like it could be better.
One of the more challenging issues I face when walking in the UK, Scotland especially, is knowing the type of surface.
Often something appears passable on Ordinance Survey and OSM maps, but once you actually get there you find it's a bog, marsh or other type of terrain impassable with walking boots. Sometimes it's terrain that would be passable if dry, but when wet becomes too slippery (e.g. lots of very small but steep dirt mounds) or filled with streams.
Your maps are amazing, but the selection is still pretty limited. Are you planning to ever have "DIY" maps, where you could select a chunk of the globe and have that printed? Or is there too much handcrafted custom tweaking required for each map to make that feasible?
If the answer is "no plans/infeasible", please at least consider adding Sydney (maybe in color?), I'm pretty sure it would look incredible.
Thank you! Unfortunately we won't be doing any choose-your-own maps, we really do spend a bunch of time on each one. I don't think we could maintain nearly the level of quality that we like.
I'd love to map Sydney. We're doing a city push right now but starting with US cities, as selling internationally adds some business complexity that we've been trying to avoid so far. As the business grows, we certainly do hope to have more maps outside of the US, and to be able to sell there as well!
All public. At this point if the data doesn't exist, we're out of luck.
I don't anticipate wall art being lucrative enough to commission our own scans. For areas the size of what we tend to map you need an airplane, a drone would take weeks to survey some of them.
I think it could be really amazing for some of your really big maps if you could walk into a room and go "whoa, that's a seriously detailed map" and then get handed the magnifier and go even deeper. Even if you only had super-resolution data for some of the big features stitched in.
A raw piece of imagesetter film behind glass or acrylic and in front of a white background would probably look pretty cool (great contrast), although you'd have some mechanical challenges getting it mounted without bubbles. It may require a fairly thick piece of glass to get enough pressure in the center, and it may require a bezel so you can clamp/glue it to the backing securely.
I plan to write another post on that with some images to show the steps, but the process differs a bit between our black+white and our satellite+hillshade images.
For the black and white, we pull in the relevant elevation models, merging various sources as necessary, compose the map (rotate if it helps), choose hillshade angle to highlight desired terrain, then export to photoshop.
Having been doing this for a while now we spend most of our time in Photoshop, adjusting color curves and healing irregularities (there seem to be more for LiDAR than for the standard 1/3 arc second DEM).
For our satellite + hillshade maps the process is a bit more involved. We actually remove the natural hillshade from the source image and add our own. This helps with perception of terrain (humans tend to perceive terrain as inverted if the sunlight is coming from the bottom of the image) and allows us to really play off the metallic print and get some pop. Even more photoshopping for these "maps."
Co-owner and I are long-time HNers. Psyched to be on the front page!