David Imus’s Map of the U.S.
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
This reminded me of Justin O’Beirne’s posts, which I’m sorry to see are now gone, about the Google and Bing maps.
Update (2012-01-03): Imus’s site was down when I first posted this, but now it’s back up. There’s a PDF showing “how the map advances geographic literacy”, and you can also purchase the map itself.
