Leesburg cartographer Tom Patterson on his decades creating visitor maps for the National Park Service (there’s a good chance his work is crumpled in your glovebox), learning to draw terrain by corresponding with an artist in Scotland, why he doesn’t lament the passing of 70s-era production techniques, how to map a piedmont glacier using satellite imagery, convincing the Park Service to give away their map files (then making it happen himself during a rained-out vacation), why he releases his designs into the public domain, how “pretty map” used to be an insult, preferring modern maps over antiques, and how “right now is the golden age of cartography.” See his work at shadedrelief.com

Malaspina Glacier panorama
NPS Grand Canyon panorama
NPS Grand Canyon cartogram
NPS map design files: find a park map, choose “Adobe print production ZIP file”
Seafloor map of Hawaii
Shaded Relief Archive, has a bunch of his pencil reliefs
Swisstopo
Natural Scene Designer
MAPublisher
Geographic Imager
QGIS
ArcMap
Eduard
Natural Earth Data
Becca Holdeusen
Alex Fries
Daniel Huffman
John Nelson
Jake Coolidge
Heinrich Berann
Hal Shelton
Tibor Toth
Marie Tharp
Mike Hall
Jeff Clark
Sarah Bell
Anton Thomas
Alex McPhee
Nathaniel Kelso


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