Ramble Maps co-owner here. Happy to answer any questions about our process or our maps.
Co-owner and I are long-time HNers. Psyched to be on the front page!
Co-owner and I are long-time HNers. Psyched to be on the front page!
And are your images really more detailled than cadastral maps (scale 1:1000) that are nowadays recording the location of a boundary stones with a maximum deviation of ±3 to 5 cm?
We do have some color images that use satellite imagery and the creation of those images is going to be the subject of my next post. We do things like remove the natural hillshade and apply our own (due to a quirk of human perception where sun coming from below causes terrain to be perceived as inverted) and blending images from different days, etc.
Re: is this really a "map?" That's a comment we get quite a bit, especially in FB comments on our ads. These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with.
Re: detail. It's all about the size of the area you are printing. Our world map uses 30-meter data, but you'd need to print it on the side of a building to see the limit to the detail. So in our sizes, using 3-5cm data wouldn't improve the maps, you wouldn't be able to see any of that detail. We only make maps if that is true.
> ... These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with.
Okay, that makes sense to a certain degree. Seems what you are doing is innovative enough that it deserves a new category of "map".
Have you considered transfering your methods from the macro to the micro world? If I understand it correctly, you could in principle inverse the zoom factors, like using the elevation model of a coin combined with texture data and a lighting model and printing a much larger version of it on a canvas.
Not to this point, but it's a very interesting idea. Someone else mentioned electron micrograph imagery, which would look incredible.
How do you manage to withhold or incorporate sketchy borders with geopolitical issues, or do you refrain from serving such locations altogether to avoid any backlash?
This is a reasonable choice for sailing charts (makes rhumb lines straight) and a reasonable choice for a zoomable web map of the world built around raster tiles (avoids the need for client-side reprojection), but is an uncommon – and in my opinion generally poor – choice for maps of the contiguous US states. What made you settle on that one? Or was it just the existing projection of the data, and you decided not to reproject it?
I think many of your maps would work a bit better (suffer substantially less distortion) if they used a region-specific projection. I have a long-term interest in map projections and would be happy to chat about possibilities if you have questions.
I don't disagree with you, I personally prefer other projections for many of our maps, but after the hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" we realized that people think of their state (and country, in the case of CONUS) in mercator, so we decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight.
For other countries, we tend to use locale specific projections.
One projection question for you, while we're chatting: do you have a favorite Asian projection? I wanted to center the projection on center mass, which would mean changing the poles, but couldn't figure that out!
Funny enough, when I see either the USA map or the California map in Mercator projection, the first thing that comes to mind is “wow the shape is completely wrong!” :-)
> favorite Asian projection?
Asia is huge, so you are necessarily going to get a lot of distortion of one kind or another. It’s a close-enough-to-circular blobby shape that you might be fine with some azimuthal projection. If you want to preserve local shapes but don’t mind variation in scale, you can use a stereographic projection centered roughly on the circumcenter. If you want to reduce distance errors while allowing a bit of local shape distortion, you could use an azimuthal equidistant projection.
(In either case, you could probably get away with either an assumed spherical earth, or you could properly correct for the ellipsoid. The difference between the two would not be too obvious at a glance.)
There are various other projections you could try. You might find one or another aesthetically better. For example perhaps some oblique conic projection would fit the region slightly better than the azimuthal projection. Or you could try something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlin_trimetric_projectio...
Here’s e.g. a nice comparison of some possible projections for Europe:
https://observablehq.com/@toja/five-map-projections-for-euro...
I really want to be able to change the latitude the projection is centered on, but haven't been able to figure out how to move that point yet, so we've got more skew near the pole than we do at the bottom of the map. Feels like it could be better.
Often something appears passable on Ordinance Survey and OSM maps, but once you actually get there you find it's a bog, marsh or other type of terrain impassable with walking boots. Sometimes it's terrain that would be passable if dry, but when wet becomes too slippery (e.g. lots of very small but steep dirt mounds) or filled with streams.
Are you aware of a good solution to this?
If the answer is "no plans/infeasible", please at least consider adding Sydney (maybe in color?), I'm pretty sure it would look incredible.
I'd love to map Sydney. We're doing a city push right now but starting with US cities, as selling internationally adds some business complexity that we've been trying to avoid so far. As the business grows, we certainly do hope to have more maps outside of the US, and to be able to sell there as well!
I don't anticipate wall art being lucrative enough to commission our own scans. For areas the size of what we tend to map you need an airplane, a drone would take weeks to survey some of them.
Might be a cool experiment to try for a map. If nothing else, it sounds fun.
There is a notable lack of quality options so a potential market for you there, or if you know of a good source can you post the link here? :)
For the black and white, we pull in the relevant elevation models, merging various sources as necessary, compose the map (rotate if it helps), choose hillshade angle to highlight desired terrain, then export to photoshop.
Having been doing this for a while now we spend most of our time in Photoshop, adjusting color curves and healing irregularities (there seem to be more for LiDAR than for the standard 1/3 arc second DEM).
For our satellite + hillshade maps the process is a bit more involved. We actually remove the natural hillshade from the source image and add our own. This helps with perception of terrain (humans tend to perceive terrain as inverted if the sunlight is coming from the bottom of the image) and allows us to really play off the metallic print and get some pop. Even more photoshopping for these "maps."