James Niehues Ski Map Artist | Hacker News Reader

James Niehues Ski Map Artist

jamesniehues.com

195 pointsthunderbong44 comments

Hein Vielkind (Austria) seems to be the ski map guy for Europe.

You can see his style in a short video [0] and two German newspaper articles [1] [2] with some pictures.

He describes that his job is not to depict reality one-to-one, but to create an appealing image with the details that are important to the clients.

"‘My most difficult assignment was the panorama of the Arlberg region,‘ he recalls of a particularly elaborate case. Because the tourism associations of St. Anton and Lech permanently disagreed on the size of the depictions, Vielkind had to completely rework the image a total of five times."

0 - https://www.brembeck.de/full/heinz-vielkind-35462

1 - https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000047191820/lifte-pisten-...

2 - https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/panoramamaler-heinz-vielk...

And in France it’s “Pierre Novat” :) you can recognise his signature on nearly all the major resorts

Yes, it's surprising that under "International" in the Niehues book, the only European country listed is Serbia...

https://jamesniehues.com/pages/book-table-of-contents

I really find the whole situation here fascinating:

1. Clearly cares. Does great work.

2. Industry is like "damn this guy does great work, do ours".

3. Consumers get used to the style. Begins to become a standard.

4. Becomes an expectation, almost like a seal of approval. "This is a ski resort".

It's an excellent example of trends feeding consumer expectations feeding trends. It's a self-fulfilling cycle.

I think it's the same reason why marketing websites for many SaaS products all look very similar. A product like Stripe with a very nice marketing site becomes successful, many other companies follow suit and copy the style. The style becomes ubiquitous. "This is a SaaS product website".

The same could be said about a lot of consumer products...cars, laptops, phones, food packaging, even art and music. There's so much stylistic homogeneity. Obviously part of it is fashion, but what is fashion except consumer expectation?

In architecture this is called typology IIUC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typology_(urban_planning_and_a...

Ie you can tell sth is a school just because of how it looks

All these comments is why I like HN. Thanks!

(Happen to be on a ski vacation this week and are staying at a place in Jackson Hole with a huge painting of his on the wall.)

We were just talking this morning about how this guy has made a career for himself.

I actually like the "monoculture" because it makes it easy to understand how resorts are laid out. It is consistent.

I went to a resort where some other person was hired to do the map and its the only place i was consistently going to the wrong place. He has a talent for showing the terrain in a way that is easy to remember and understand

I rememember going to a talk at the computer history museum given by Apple old-timers Chris Espinosa and Larry Tesler in the early 2000s.

One of the things they talked about was System 6 or System 7, and an example of how it was different from Windows 3 in one of many ways: The system bar—“File”, “View”, etc.—was at the top of the screen, not each window. This consistency made it easy “throw” the cursor to the top of the screen and get to the thing you needed, a consistent experience, no matter what app you were in or what the window layout was.

This “consistency of experience” point always stayed with me as such a core principle of good design, whether in computer UIs, quick serve restaurants, or here, I guess, ski map visual style.

> Happen to be on a ski vacation this week

I'm from a small mountain town in Norway. There's about 2500 people here normally, but >40000 people here now during Easter. I like your "happen to be", heh, feels like everyone's here!

Our poor little roundabout. All traffic in the city has to go through it. The roads aren't built for this amount of cars.

Most of the ski maps in France were drawn by Pierre Novat. He died in 2007. His daughter Frederique continues his work.

http://www.atelier-novat.com/

When I was a kid I loved these ski maps almost more than skiing itself. I would take them home and enjoy carefully looking at all the details. Never considered the man behind the maps until now.

Me too. So much so I bought his book. It's great if you're into this sort of thing. https://jamesniehues.com/pages/the-man-behind-the-map

I always just assumed it was a common style, but wow, pretty much every ski map I've ever used was actually painted by the same guy. Amazing.

I'm so curious. What do the resorts pay him for this service? Is this a full-time occupation for him? Who owns the IP rights? Did he have to negotiate them back to be able to create his book?

Since he mostly seems to do North America it`s definitely a global common style. Piste maps seems to have been looking this way since 1970. Take a look at the 1970 map here https://skimap.org/SkiAreas/view/987 or any other place in the world. That said, obviously all artist have their own style and technique.

I used to also love piste maps as a kid, and still go skiing a few times per year. One of the best activities I know. Outdoor, exercise and spectacular views for a whole day. What a dream!

He has a book where that’s explained, I remember reading it but don’t remember the answer anymore.

Jim is a wonderful person who I've had the pleasure of interacting with a few times in real life; he simply loves what he does and has become THE source for ski area illustrations, even as resorts stop physically printing trail maps.

Proud to have bought a bunch of his original paintings and drawings of my home mountains when he put them up for sale a year ago. The artistry and practicality I find really beautiful.

Some of the maps reflect very narrow windows of time. For instance, the whistler map covers the time after harmony bowl opened but before the peak to peak gondola. I think that places it in the 1999-2005 era. That was a great time, back when normal people could afford to ski regularly. Although taking harmony bowl away from the "backcountry" skiing community by putting a lift on it was not good.

I'm pretty certain peak to peak opened earlier than 2005. More like 2002.

It was opened right before the Olympics. 2008. Easy to fact check.

I'm barely a skier but I really enjoyed this! The style. The backstory. The person. Happy thoughts.

Then (inevitably?) ... "I wonder what the right AI model and prompt could generate in Niehues' style..." Maybe a solid facsimile. Maybe "superior" in some way. Less than happy thoughts. Regardless of output. Don't want.

I think I need this book.

I've had a copy of his coffee table books for a few years. It's fun for people flipping through a looking at the paintings for places they know - the familiar backdrops, but without the run makers or other clutter.

Nice maps, but semi off topic question about the website:

If I scroll down to continue reading, some thing slides in from the bottom right to sign up for newsletter. That basically makes me just close the tab and not care anymore.

I assume whoever runs this website gets more income out of having this thing slide in than not have it exist.

But at least myself close the website because of it. Is my brain wired so differently from other people? Does the thing that slides in make most people interact more with the website, instead of less like me?

At least if most people dislike it, like me, I can't imagine they'd gain more income from making this slide-in thing. Or is there only a tiny percentage of people that like it, and just that tiny percentage gives so much income to the website that the other 99% all have to suffer?

Yes. And oh and it’s an online store except there are no prices. Just turns into a submission form to contact the artist. (At least for the originals.). Forget it.

Yes, there are prices for prints only. A signed print is around 2k, so an original is uh, more than that. I think Artists truly get much more out of buyers who they develop a relationship with, so having a fixed price online store for originals isn’t something desirable.

He’s got an awesome coffee table book for any skiers in your life!

Gorgeous. I like how Timberline has a smoking Mt. St. Helens.

Mad props I had to go back and verify. You’re observant

I like Niehues maps. I like ski maps from the '80s that have topo lines.

I like 'em all.

Oooh that's gonna be a great gift for a few friends

He had a kickstarter a few years ago. My neighbor friend and I used to draw our own ski maps of our dream ski areas and James was our inspo.

I bought my friend the ski map book as a gift, highly recommend it.

Img2Img say hello :)

I kinda hate this guy. Has turned American ski resort maps into a monoculture. I guess it’s not his fault, but it is a bummer.

Back before him resort maps had a lot more variety.

What did they look like before? Have any favorites?

I saw a Killington map from the mid 80s that looked like a subway map.

https://www.newenglandskihistory.com/maps/

Different style for sure, but also much more difficult to read in my opinion. Elevation being depicted with topographical lines is harder for me to parse than elevation depicted with illustrated terrain.

On the flip side, it's nice to see hand-drawn maps instead of computer generated ones.

And they would almost certainly have devolved into generic computer generated graphics without his continued influence

Nothing is stopping other people from making them… presumably others would be hired if they were better. Hate is a strong word to use against someone who is just doing what they enjoy and not hurting anyone.

I agree, it would be helpful if resorts had a plain version of the ski map that shows the routes on each slope in 2D with some elevation markings (obviously most trails go down so it’s not too hard to guess the incline).

The artistic map is nice to look at if you’ve been to the mountain before but loses so much detail on proportional distance and heights between each route that I end up using google maps or OSM overlays my first time on the mountain.

As I side project, I've been working on something to solve this: For ski resorts, 2D maps loose a lot of detail and have a lot of compromises (but are easy to understand and navigate).

3D maps offer more detail but are a pain to navigate and are often disorienting for non-technical users.

My thought is a "2.5 degree" hybrid map. One that maintains the important 3D detail but keeps the navigation "on rails" so as to make everything easier.

I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this, keeping in mind that this would be targeted at casual users and probably not HN types (HN types probably have no problem navigating/groking a true 3D map).

Depends on how you’re trying to use the map, I find the the Niehues style great for finding a path to a lift or a lodge.

If you’re trying to get a sense of terrain, the “FATMAP by Strava” 3d map is the best I’ve seen, with notes on off piste routes and various aspect, incline, topo etc overlays (and this is not a paid promo).

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