#maps posts — Ben Crowder

After linking to Felt not too long ago, I actually tried it out and goodness, it’s a delight. Easy t...

Ben Crowder — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 12:00:00 GMT

After linking to Felt not too long ago, I actually tried it out and goodness, it’s a delight. Easy to use, beautiful (I like the graphic design so much more than what Google Maps has), and the tools are great.

I made a family history map showing the towns where my Spanish and Cuban ancestors lived and shared it with my siblings:

Though I haven’t done these things in this particular map, being able to call out specific buildings and add text labels and custom polygons are all features that make Felt compelling to me. For example, I’m making another map showing where my dad’s family is from. I know my great-grandmother had a bakery on a certain street, but I don’t know exactly where it was on that street. Rather than choosing some arbitrary point along the street for a misleading pin, I’m able to mark the whole street with a custom polygon.

It feels like Google Docs for maps. Love it.

Reply via email

Links #47

Ben Crowder — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Stephanie Eckles on practical uses of CSS math functions. Some great examples here.

Matt DesLauriers on pen plotter art and algorithms. I keep thinking about buying or building a plotter. Someday…

Paul Foster’s HTML tags memory test. Got 70.

Sakira Ventura’s world map of female composers. Love this.

Eric Bailey’s introduction to macOS Voice Control. Both this and Head Pointer are really quite impressive.

Reply via email

Links #43

Ben Crowder — Wed, 05 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

Tyler Hobbs on color arrangement in generative art. I haven’t done much generative art lately (and don’t know how much I’ll end up actually doing in the future), but I like Tyler’s work and this is a good writeup.

Phil Plait on David Novick’s colored spheres optical illusion. Wow.

Shawn Wang on quality vs. consistency. Which is something I feel I could do much, much better at here on this site.

Matthias Ott about personal websites. A good thing to remember.

Jason Kottke linking to a map of the world’s lighthouses. Look at Norway!

Reply via email

Outline map of Britain and Ireland

Ben Crowder — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 12:00:00 GMT

So I got this idea of making an outline map of Britain and Ireland and then compiling a list of fifty populous/famous towns and cities, to see how well I can locate them on the map. Being an Anglophile, I thought I’d do pretty well. Ha. It was sad. (But I did get London.)

Anyway, should you care to test your knowledge, you can now download PDFs of both the map and my semi-arbitrary list of towns and cities. Enjoy.

Notes on how I made these

For the map, I used TileMill to style and generate the map lines. I exported the map to SVG, converted it to Illustrator, and then imported it into InDesign and added the label.

For the list of towns and cities, I took a list of the most populous cities and added in some literary places as well. Basically, it’s a very-not-comprehensive list of places in Britain and Ireland that I’ve heard of.

Reply via email

Utah County roads

Ben Crowder — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Made in TileMill (which I read about on the Routelines about page — thanks to Tod Robbins for telling me about it).

I took the Census Bureau’s shapefiles for Utah County, imported them into TileMill, styled the lines a little, and exported to SVG. Then I imported it into Illustrator, applied a thin pencil brush (it’s not very noticeable, honestly), exported to PNG, pulled it into Photoshop, and added some color and texture. Voila: the roads of Utah County.

Reply via email