After many weeks of production, we here at Springer Cartographics couldn’t be happier to announce the release of the Cartography Design Annual #1 book. Conceived, edited, and designed by me, Nick Springer, the intention of the book is to provide an annual gallery some of the best designed maps from around the world.

We plan on doing this every year with new maps from each calendar year. The book features a wide range of creative styles, with a primary focus on the quality of the visual designs. There are a number of other annual map books, but they all focus on maps created with particular software packages.

The book is available now for purchase from Lulu.com, an on-demand book printer, for $39.95 plus shipping. Hopefully in a month or two it will also be available from the main online book sellers like Amazon.com and BN.com.

In May, HarperCollins released the latest work by Simon Winchester titled “The Man Who Loved China” which includes 3 maps by Springer Cartographics. As Publisher’s Weekly describes it:

Joseph Needham (1900–1995) is the man who made China China, forming the West’s understanding of a sophisticated culture with his masterpiece, Science and Civilization in China, says bestselling author Winchester. In a life devoted to recording the Middle Kingdom’s intellectual wealth, Needham, an eccentric, brilliant Cambridge don, made a remarkable journey from son of a London doctor through scientist-adventurer to red scare target. In Winchester’s (The Professor and the Madman) estimable hands, Needham’s story comes to life straightaway. From the biochemist’s arrival in WWII Chongqing (the smells, of incense smoke, car exhaust, hot cooking oil, a particularly acrid kind of pepper, human waste, oleander, and jasmine) to his steely discipline when crafting his research into prose (to an old friend: I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you), Winchester plunges the reader into the action with hardly a break. As the author notes in an outstanding epilogue—a swirling 12-page trip through the kaleidoscope of contemporary China—he is at pains to place Needham front and center in our understanding of the nation that now plays such a huge role in American life.

This is the second book we have illustrated for Mr. Winchester.

The University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio has just gone live with their new campus map which we designed and produced.  The project consisted of both a print map to hand-out to prospective students and a Flash-based interactive map (click on “Campus Map”) for the web site.  We collaborated with Mapformation to create the building illustrations.  Jim Blakeslee of Geocentric programmed the interactive map which went beyond your typical pan-and-zooming.  We wanted to create a system by which the folks at the University of Dayton could update the building images and descriptions in an external file without having to rely on us to recreate the Flash.  Jim did a tremendous job of pulling this together.

Nat Kelso, the staff cartographer for The Washington Post and an acquaintance of mine, has published a fascinating look at the work of Toni Mair, a Swiss artist that creates 3-dimensional models of landscapes. Nat, and a few other cartographers, got a rare glimpse of the process Toni uses to create these amazing works of precision and beauty.

Over the past 5 years, we have designed maps for 17 book published by HarperCollins, starting with “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson. While most of these have been non-fiction titles, there have been some works of fiction as well. Many of the book have been on the New York Times bestsellers lists, and one (”The News from Paraguay,” by Lily Tuck) even won a National Book Award. We are very proud of our association with HarperCollins and hope it continues.

Read on to see is a list of all the books that contain our maps.

Back in 2005 we started working on a map of San Juan Island, part of a group of islands with the same name in the Straits of Juan de Fuca in Washington State. The islands are a popular vacation destination near Seattle, with nature as the primary draw. Orcas and other whales are plentiful in the islands as well as numerous birds. The islands are also popular with artists and nearby are the tulip fields of the Skagit River Delta.

The local Windermere Real Estate office in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island asked us to create a map they could share with visitors, with the requirement that it showed and labeled EVERY road on the island for the purposes of real estate as well. We created that map and it quickly became the most popular map of the island, going through several printings. That success in turn led to us creating maps for 2 more of the islands in the group, Orcas Island and Lopez Island, both maps becoming just as popular.

Click the Read On link to see an interactive sample of the maps.

Over the past week or so we have been slowly rolling out changes to our website. Many of the changes are aimed at making our site more search engine friendly, but a big goal is to provide more information and services to our customers and potential customers.

The entire portfolio section has been changed to make it more visual appealing and easier to navigate. This News section is new, as is the Laminated Wall Maps section (see below). In upcoming weeks we will be adding something really new and exciting for everyone to experience, so stay tuned!

We get often get requests for custom wall maps depicting entire counties or multiple counties, showing all the roads, zip codes, etc. Businesses like these maps laminated so they can mark them up for various purposes like defining territories, plotting customers, and planning delivery routes. Unfortunately it is very cost prohibitive to create these kinds of maps on a one-off basis from scratch, so we have partnered with Market Maps.

Market Maps have been around for years, and have created an automated system that makes it fast, easy, and cost-effective to make one-off maps up to an amazing 9 feet by 12 feet (of course smaller sizes are available). Their automated online order process makes it easy to define the areas and features that you want.

If you are not sure what you need contact us and we can work with you directly to get exactly the map that suits your needs from Market Maps. Just click the Laminated Wall Maps link at the top of this page for more information.

We recently completed a project for the Structural Engineers Association of Colorado (SEAC) to create a map of the average snow load across the state of Colorado. They provided an Excel spreadsheet of 400 sample locations each with the latitude and longitude and average snow load (pounds per square foot). We plotted this data and then interpolated the points into a surface from which we could create contour lines. The map was printed at 24″ x 36″ and we were very pleased with the results.

If you would like more information about obtaining a copy of the map, please contact SEAC directly.

I have decided to jump on the Web 2.0 band wagon and add a blog to my site. I will be posting information about new projects, published works, and interesting articles. You can also find lots more general content about cartographers and cartography at CartoTalk.com and CartoBlog.com, two community sites that I have created. I am proud to say that CartoTalk is the biggest community site for cartographers worldwide. I it’s 4 years of existence it has become a tremendous resource for professional and beginner cartographers alike.

Enjoy!