Notes
What these notes are about — the work behind the maps, technical and otherwise.
These notes accompany the maps. Where a finished map shows the result, the notes show the work behind it — the decisions about projection, colour, generalisation, and the trade-offs that rarely survive into the final sheet. A map is a flat, edited surface. Almost everything that went into making it is invisible by design. These entries are where some of that becomes visible again.
Why write them down
A finished map hides its own making. The choices that shaped it — what to keep, what to drop, where to bend accuracy for legibility — are settled silently and then disappear. Writing them down serves two purposes.
The first is to share. Cartographic decisions are rarely documented, and the reasoning behind a particular projection or colour ramp is often more useful to others than the map itself.
The second is to remember. A workflow assembled over years lives in scattered scripts and half-recalled habits. Putting it into words is a way of keeping it — and of noticing where it could be better.
What the notes cover
The entries fall into a few loose groups. They are not a fixed schedule, and they overlap more often than not.
- Behind the map. How a specific map was built, from raw data to final sheet — the projection, the palette, the generalisation, and the reasons behind each.
- Technical. Working with satellite imagery, processing rasters, building interactive maps, and the small tools and scripts that hold a workflow together.
- Research. Longer threads in landscape and historical work, and the way spatial thinking carries across cartography, teaching, and earlier work in architecture and archaeology.
- Looking outward. Notes on other people’s maps — what works, what doesn’t, and what a particular design decision was trying to solve.
What they are not
The aim is not a tutorial series or a feed. There is no fixed cadence, no attempt at completeness, no house style to maintain. Some entries are a few hundred words; others are longer. Some are technical to the point of being useful only to a handful of people; others step well back.
What holds them together is a single concern: making sense of space and shape, and giving it a form others can read. The maps are one expression of that. These notes are another.