map design

Ever since I can remember I have had an obsession with maps. I can spend hours studying maps, imagining the places that they represent. I still have boxes of old maps that I have collected. I'm not interested in their value as collectibles, I just want to be able to look at them. I've spent countless hours drawing maps, experimenting with different ways of showing topography and trying to make them more beautiful. I feel that there is a strong connection between my love of the natural world around me and my love of its representation by lines and shapes on paper. So, even though this is a blog about hiking trails, this post is going to be all about maps.

I remember when I was about 10, I was pretty excited when my dad told me that he was going buy some maps that showed the hills around our home in Lafayette. When he came home with several topographic maps, I was at first a bit disappointed. What were all of these brown squiggly lines? But I learned how to read the contours, and soon I could see the shapes that they represented. I began using the maps while hiking in the hills and finally appreciated how useful they could be. I spent many hours drawing my own maps, learning to show topography with shading or hachures, and I became pretty good at it. Then, in my mid-twenties, I decided to get more serious about it and make something really challenging.

My idea was that I would make a 3D map of Yosemite and paint it with natural colors, and I imagined it as more a work of art than a map. I based it on a 1:125,000 topographic map of the park — about 30 in. square. I spent a year or so of my spare time building it. I encountered plenty of problems to overcome, but when it was done, I was quite pleased with the results, and I still enjoy looking at it hanging on my bedroom wall.

Relief map of Yosemite, cast in epoxy and hand-painted

In the early 70s, when I was making the map, lots of people were looking for more satisfying ways to make a living and I was one of them. I thought maybe the map would lead to something — maybe I could sell copies of it, but then I got another idea, writing a trail guide to the East Bay. That project turned to be relatively successful. My book East Bay Trails needed a lot of maps and to make them required a lot of learning about graphics and printing, and that eventually led to a career in graphics. A year or two after I had finished my book, I was approached by a young guy, Tom Taber, who wanted help with a similar book that he was writing about the Santa Cruz Mountains. We went on a lot of hikes together, and I produced all of the maps for his first edition.

Quite a few years later, I was browsing the library shelves at Cal State Hayward, and I came across a book that really blew my mind. It was Kartographische Gelandedarstellung by Eduard Imhof, a Swiss cartographer. It was all about methods of showing topography on maps, going way beyond anything I had seen at the time. The only problem was it was all in German, but I was able to understand some of it from the illustrations. Some time later an English translation appeared, Cartographic Relief Presentation, and I was able to read it. Imhof's ideas were used to produce all of the Swiss topographic maps, and in 1995, I was in London and was able to visit a map store that sold them, and I picked up several. In addition to contours, these maps included beautiful drawing of rocks and cliffs. I wanted to be able to design maps like that.

example of Swiss topo map

I'm a long-time member of the Sierra Club, and sometime in the early 90s I came across a note in the Yodeler, the newsletter of the San Francisco Bay Chapter. The editor, Don Foreman, was looking for volunteers to produce maps to illustrate articles. I had recently bought a Macintosh and was learning to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, so I began producing maps for the newsletter, and continued to do so for about 20 years. At first it was a struggle to work with the software (which was still in its earliest stages), but I soon figured it out. Often the biggest challenge was to get good directions about what kind of map they wanted. The author of the article did not always agree with the editor on what to include in a map. But overall, it was a fun experience and I enjoyed seeing my maps in print.

typical example of my maps for the Yodeler

In the early days of the internet, there were not a lot of map resources available online, but by the mid-90s, I realized that some useful stuff was showing up. I learned about GIS software and wanted to explore it but it was nearly all for Windows, not Mac. I found one Mac program, Avenza's MapPublisher, and it allowed me to convert USGS map data files into Adobe Illustrator. The map quadrangles showed up as just a tangle of lines, and it took many hours of manual work to sort them out and make something resembling a map.

The idea came to me to put together a complete map of the Bay Area and color it with the shading and natural color ideas that I had been dreaming of for years. It soon became a massive project that I became obsessed with for many years. It ended up taking about 15 years on and off because I kept discovering new and better resources on the internet, so I actually reworked much of the map several times. I still see it as a work in progress, but I'm pretty well satisfied with it now.

complete map

full scale section

Before I retired, I was able to use some 3D software, mostly Strata Studio Pro, and it occurred to me that the software could be used to make a 3D model from a map. I spent quite a lot of time figuring out how I could do that, and actually put together a model of a small local area that combined topography with satellite images, and it worked. Soon after that Google Earth appeared, doing much the same thing but covering the whole world. It felt like my efforts had been kind of a waste of time.

I had another experience kind of like that when I came across closedcontour.com. A guy created a topographic map of the High Sierra which in many ways is an improvement over the USGS version, and he says he did it in three weeks by writing code to bring together several online databases. His method was way more efficient than my efforts with Photoshop and Illustrator and it made me realize that the future of mapping is with programmers, not artists. But that's not going to stop me from playing around with map design. The internet is loaded with ugly computer generated maps. A little artistic sensibility can go a long way.

When I started this blog, I thought I was going to create my own beautiful maps to illustrate my hikes, and I even started working on some of them, but I soon realized that it would mean countless hours of work. I decided that copying parts of EBRPD maps was a much easier way to go.

When I started writing this blog post, I began taking another look at Swiss topo maps, and got the idea that maybe I could apply a similar style to the High Sierra. So I've spent the last several months trying to do that. It took quite a few false starts before I worked out a way to do the rock drawing. I chose an area of the northeast corner of Yosemite National Park, partly because it is an area I am quite familiar with, but also because I felt that it is a good example of High Sierra terrain. I put it all together from USGS topo maps and satellite images available online. It was slow, tedious work, but I enjoyed doing it.

complete map area

section of map at full scale

When I finished this map, I thought it would be fun to do Yosemite Valley in the same style, so I set off on another project. This time it went together much faster because of my experience with the first map.

section of map at full scale