A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
How cartography made early modern global trade possible.
Maps and legends. Beautiful!
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.
A list of alternatives to Google’s products.
Chris Ferdinandi is a machine!
A vanilla JS roadmap, along with learning resources and project ideas to help you get started.
Minimalist cartography.
Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.
While a geographical map is helpful if you want to find your way around the world, a population cartogram is the representation that we need if we want to know where our fellow humans are at home.
This ever-growing curated collection of interface patterns on CodePen is a reliable source of inspiration.
Harry describes the process he uses for auditing the effects of third-party scripts. He uses the excellent Request Map which was mentioned multiple times at the Delta V conference.
The focus here is on performance, but these tools are equally useful for shining a light on just how bad the situation is with online surveillance and tracking.
A beautiful visualisation of shipping routes and cargo. Mesmerising!
You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
Hot nuclear blasts in your area.
(like Eric’s HYDEsim)
This is a fascinating way to explore time and place—a spyglass view of hundred year old maps overlaid on the digital maps of today.
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.
You can use Google Maps to explore the worlds of our solar system …and take a look inside the ISS.