Sanborn Fire Maps
A complete digital archive of the famous typography from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
The lettering really is lovely!
Link tags: map
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OpenFreeMap
This project, based on OpenStreetMap, looks great:
OpenFreeMap lets you display custom maps on your website and apps for free.
You can either self-host or use our public instance.
I’m going to try it out on The Session once there’s documentation for using this with Leaflet.
Should this be a map or 500 maps? - by Elan Ullendorff
This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.
There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.
A microdata enhanced HTML Webcomponent for Leaflet | k-nut — Blog
Here’s a nice HTML web component that uses structured data in the markup to populate a Leaflet map.
Personally I’d probably use microformats rather than microdata, but the princple is the same: progressive enhancement from plain old HTML to an interactive map.
Our Maps Don’t Know Where You Are – The Markup
I wish more publishers and services took this approach to evaluating technology:
We scrutinize third-party services before including them in our articles or elsewhere on our site. Many include trackers or analytics that would collect data on our readers. These may be standard across much of the web, but we don’t use them.
GB Renewables Map
A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:
It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.
Misconceptions
Some common geographic mental misplacements.
The Customer Onboarding Handbook [PDF]
A free PDF with five articles:
- The Brand Experience Gap by Emma Parnell
- Ongoing Onboarding: Taking Customers from First Use to Product Mastery by Chris How
- Just Add ICE: 3 Ways to Make Your Customer Experience More Meaningful by Candi Williams
- Effectively Researching and Using Customer Journey Maps by Lauren Isaacson
- Using and Abusing Surveys in Customer Onboarding by Caroline Jarrett
Three of those authors spoke at this year’s UX London!
News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit
Good news and bad news…
The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!
The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.
City of Women London
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
Design as (un)ethical illusion
Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.
But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.
Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:
Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.
Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Mapping a World of Cities
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Spatial Awareness
Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.
geoTrad - Google My Maps
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
getlon.lat
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
This Video Has {{ viewcount }} Views - YouTube
Tom’s videos are so good! Did you see his excellent in-depth piece on copyright?
This one is all about APIs and the golden age of Web 2.0 when we were free to create mashups.
It pairs nicely with a piece by another Tom from a couple of years back on the joy of Twitterbots.
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.