Evolution of a Map

You can buy the latest Seattle map.

Version 1 was all about the concept. I had seen Ursula K. LeGuin’s map of a flooded Central Valley in Always Coming Home, and then was directly inspired by Burrito Justice’s map of San Francisco after global warming had melted the ice caps. My first version and write-up was published in the Whole U.

So bright! So vivid! It was basic, no hillshading, with hypsometric colors that were straight off the ESRI style shelf. The map, and my cartographic skills, have come a long way since then.

I toned it down a bit for the second version. I de-saturated, made the water a little greener, and added some hillshade to the land. This version was sold in Northwest Framing shops.

The shape of Seattle really called for a narrower layout. The square shape I’d been working with included some interesting landforms, but I wanted to emphasize the city itself. I tightened up to more closely conform to Seattle’s narrow shape, removing the Archipelago of Bainbridge and a few other suburban locales from the composition.

I wanted to simplify, so I removed the north arrow. I clipped everything to 18×24, which also works as a more standard format for printing.

This iteration removed the line delineating the current shore, replacing it with a color ramp to represent the sunken parts of the city in a way that emphasized the lost land.

It was around this time that I was pointed toward the more recent and accepted stats for sea rise levels published by the IPCC. Based on this, I reduced the level of sea rise from 240′ to 215′.

I left it here for a couple of years before re-visiting the map again.

Earlier this year, a company where I’d been working unexpectedly folded, so I suddenly had extra time to experiment with some new graphic techniques. I wanted to create maps that were beautiful and compelling enough to hang on your wall, even if you weren’t a map geek.

I made three new versions of the Seattle (and Portland) maps. The first was an updated hypsometric map.

For the new versions, I abandoned any off-the-shelf graphics that I’d used in the previous maps,  creating a custom color ramp for the land, and rendering a new hillshade layer with Blender. The water is now a desaturated blue-gray, I simplified the title, and added some subtle transparencies along with drop-shading to simultaneously soften and emphasize the text.

I’ve been fascinated with old maps since I was a kid, and I’ve enjoyed taking old public domain maps and removing the tears, discolorations, and bureaucratic stamps that they had suffered from over the years (see this post, this post,  this post, and this post). The terrain shading and patinas of those old maps inspired this retro-future version of the Seattle sea rise map. This map uses a brown slope map, merged with the Blender hillshade layer, and elements that emphasize convex ridgelines with a subtle lightening, and concave landforms with a subtle darkening.

Next is the goth map. This one has the same gray-blue water as the others, but the land is rendered in gradations of dark gray to black for elevation, combined with the Blender-rendered hillshade layer.

You can buy the latest Seattle map.