I am a geographer at Simon Fraser University with research interests in Geographic Information Systems and Computer Graphics. In 1985 when I returned full-time to the Geography Department from a joint appointment with the School of Computing Science, I took over the teaching of cartography (map making) under the condition that I could stay away from pen-and-ink drafting and use the computer as the only graphic tool. Since then we are spending our practical time in the MacLab, starting out with a simple paint/draft program (SuperPaint) and then moving to a PostScript program (Adobe Illustrator).
The results are impressive.In a course that was unilaterally disliked before 1985, the students develop a creative enthusiasm that gets everybody going. This new tool gives them a degree of freedom that makes drawing maps real fun. The enclosed examples hopefully demonstrate this point.
Either Preview, Draw or Icon will display the files. Yap does it too but it is really not designed for files of that size, but it makes it possible to change the PostScript code. I like it best with Scene since I get the maps on an empty screen (first you have to select the background to white) and I can rotate and scale them. Some of the maps are rotated by 90 degrees to fit them on a sheet of paper. You likely will have to re-size many of them for printing. Feel free to print them and show them to others, just mention who created them.
AirDisaster
"Britain's Worst Air Disaster" was the title of Pat Choy's final project. Besides showing meticulous work, these four maps are some of the best cartographic design that I have seen in my classes. They very effectively tell the story. Notice the frequent use of "insets", a cartographer's favorite.
Diagrams
To give students non-trivial tasks for one of their assignments, I chose some graphics from a magazine published by the Environmental Science Research Institute (ESRI), the makers of ARC/INFO, one of the most successful Geographic Information Systems.
Glaciation
Glen Musgrave created four graphics to show the development of a glacial valley. As the basis he chose drawings from a book in geomorphology.
Indian Art
To get to know Adobe Illustrator, I worked with Northwest Indian art, one of my hobbies. I scanned two designs by Roy Vickers, a B.C. Indian living in Tofino on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. These are a runner, standing in the blocks, waiting for the starting gun, and a diver, just off the board, with his hands around the legs. I redrew both and then "unrapped" them. The artwork is still that of Roy Vickers, I added and corrected only where the change of position demanded it (except for the diver's head and hand which I stole from the runner). Incidentally, Roy Vickers has given me permission to use his work for this purpose.
Northwest Indian design is ideal for Bezier curves: The individual "paths" (closed curves) are best drawn with very few anchor points and some groups of paths are repeated in different parts of the designs (good examples are the "ovoid" in the hands and knees and the concentric circles in the joints of both athletes) .
Islands
Two of the charming Gulf Islands (between Vancouver and Vancouver Island) were used for displays by John Stigger (Pender Island) and Robert Lloyd (Saturna Island). John admits that in the heat of the deadline he committed a few errors with the three-dimensional display (which you can see if you watch the drawing being created in Preview). PenderIsl4, the shaded relief, was produced by Tom using John's contour map.
New Westminster
Jon Burgoyne was less interested in a sophisticated representation of this suburb of Vancouver than in the experimentation with cartographic design principles. Compare the different approaches to the display of the legend (the area that explains what the symbols represent) and the border lines.
Panda
I needed something to show how Bezier curves (drawn by Adobe Illustrator) look on different types of printers and used the Panda from the Illustrator Tutorial as the basis. There are eight Pandas in the "Recursive Panda", produced by iterations.
Vancouver Island
Heather MacDonald produced many thematic maps for Vancouver Island. Here are two of them. Watch Preview create the picture to see how she worked with overlays.
The Icon
Here is an easy way to produce three-dimensional drawings:
1. Fill an area with a light-gray shade.
2. Draw contours, so that
a. every portion with tangents between South-East to North-West is drawn in black,
b. every portion with tangents between North-West to South-East is drawn in white.
The Icon below the title is a good example. For the academically inclined, this is a simplified version of Kitiro Tanaka's shaded contours. If you want to get scholarly (or want to experiment with other types of relief shading), write me a note (Tom_Poiker@cc.sfu.ca) and I will give you some references.
