US highway endpoints, photos, maps, and historyMap portfolio
I've been fascinated by maps nearly all my life, and I've been a professional cartographer since 1990. Most of my maps are for publication in telephone directories, and the majority of those are detailed street-level maps. Cartography for this medium presents its own set of challenges. Most directories utilize the four-color process, but some books printed for smaller markets are limited to black ink only. The paper is usually of rather poor quality, so ink saturation and dot gain influence color choices.
I can't claim for certain that I made the first phone book map that included shaded relief, so I'll put it this way: when I did it, it was the first one I had ever seen. It's not easy to use shaded relief successfully with a detailed street map that's printed on flimsy paper - the elementary concept of "neutral gray for flat terrain" doesn't work, because it tends to obscure the more important information (such as roads and labels). But I still think it's desireable to use shaded relief - particularly on maps of communities in which topography is a big factor - and I think there are some ways it can be done well, even in phone books. You can decide for yourself: some of the images linked below include shaded relief.
Click on the links that follow to view some examples of the map work I've done over the years (most pages show a reduced-scale overview of the entire basemap, and then a full-detail sample from some part of the map):
If you have any questions or comments about these maps or about my services, please contact me.
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