Ontario explorer, mapmaker, and conservationist Hap Wilson on drawing 400 guide maps across 50 years, traveling more than 40,000 miles of Canadian wilderness by canoe, the one digital tool he likes (it’s Google Earth), saving lives by creating

Erick Ingraham: “I guess I gravitate towards difficulty.”

23 days ago 29m 49s

Colorado painter, illustrator and mapmaker Erick Ingraham on solving art directors’ problems, making it interesting for himself (“I’m known to make things more complicated than they might need to be”), spending eight years painting the Rockies’

Stephen Walter: “Maps are inherently political if they’re interesting.”

Feb 20th, 2024 42m 36s

London artist and mapmaker Stephen Walter on two decades of drawing and painting “the semiotic residues of humankind,” an invitation to map an Ivorian national park (and why you should wait for the dry season before attempting this), approachin

John Tauranac: “I seldom think macroscopically; I think microscopically.”

Dec 26th, 2023 36m

Manhattan writer and cartographer John Tauranac on his first maps of Midtown’s pedestrian passages, a public debate with Massimo Vignelli (“His geography was egregious”), working at a very different MTA (they used to have an aesthetics committe

Andrew Middleton: “There’s something poetic about running a map store.”

Dec 12th, 2023 50m 9s

In early 2023 GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton saw a tweet about Andy Nosal’s search for someone to take over The Map Center, Nosal's map shop in Pawtucket, RI; six months later Middleton left California to move into one of the las

Lionel Portier: “What I'm trying to convey with my maps is the pleasure of seeing beautiful things.”

Dec 4th, 2023 28m 33s

Lyonnais illustrator and designer Lionel Portier on a mapmaking career that spans 30 years and five continents, accepting any map challenge an art director might conceive, a travel magazine gig that led to an Australian passport, painting 100 b

Isaac Dushku: “A map has to evoke a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home.”

Nov 27th, 2023 38m 13s

Utah artist Isaac Dushku on how a map has to evoke either a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home, the best- and worst-selling states in his catalog (he drew all 50), taking his business Lord of Maps from being ghosted on Facebook Marketpla

Sam Usle: “Slowly but surely we’re starting to recover the built environment.”

Nov 20th, 2023 46m 35s

Urbanist and illustrator Sam Usle on designing human-scale communities and rendering them in watercolors, why theme parks reflect a yearning for human-scale towns, redesigning part of his high school campus before graduation, why you can thank

Naomi Rosenberg: "Get out of your sighted bubble.”

Nov 13th, 2023 33m 37s

Naomi Rosenberg, assistant director of the Media and Accessible Design Lab at San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind, discusses the art of making fingertip-readable maps: why clutter is the enemy of good tactile maps, the quest for an afforda

Matthew Dean Shaffer: “My approach is to try and be as accurate as possible.“

Oct 9th, 2023 52m 22s

New Haven architectural designer and artist Matthew Dean Shaffer on balancing accuracy with art, taking a break from straight lines to draw birds, software-driven homogeneity in American architecture (“Straight-out-of-Revit, as we say”), why he

Jamshid Kooros: “These maps are based on walking, walking, walking.”

Oct 2nd, 2023 56m 5s

Arlington “reformed architect” and pictorial cartographer Jamshid Kooros discusses his 30 years of mapmaking based on photographs, sketching and “walking, walking, walking,” the end of the drop-in pitch, turning three-week hikes into maps of Fr

David Kulbeth: “It's taken so long to get everything just right because there's no guidebook to this.”

Sep 25th, 2023 35m 53s

Stafford cartographer and entrepreneur David Kulbeth on reviving old map aesthetics with his digital-to-copperplate-to-print-to-watercolor technique, the (costly) difference between copperplate etching and engraving, finding a custom papermaker

Sophie Parr: “I have to mathematically scale it, plan it, sketch it, draw it.”

Sep 18th, 2023 32m

Fish Creek artist and gallery owner Sophie Parr on creating more than one hundred 0.5"-to-the-mile maps using aerial imagery and a 0.2mm-tip pen, why she only accepts 2x2" commissions (while working on her own 2x3 ft. map of Chicago), represent

Lee France: “It was fun to try to achieve those paper map elements in this new digital space.”

Sep 11th, 2023 41m 13s

Sandpoint cartographer Lee France on making his first topos in Chile, spending months on a single map for National Geographic Trails Illustrated, the challenge of making an attractive interactive map that includes every scale from hilltop to he

Gregor Turk: “I always focused on the map’s ability to simultaneously represent and distort reality.”

Sep 4th, 2023 49m 32s

Atlanta visual artist, sculptor and “topophiliac” Gregor Turk on walking 250 miles of the U.S./Canada border, creating landscapes with clay, wood and recycled inner tubes, turning Landsat imagery into hundreds of hand-painted ceramic tiles, mak

Tom Patterson: “Right now is the golden age of cartography.”

Aug 21st, 2023 1h 12m

Leesburg cartographer Tom Patterson on his decades creating visitor maps for the National Park Service (there’s a good chance his work is crumpled in your glovebox), learning to draw terrain by corresponding with an artist in Scotland, why he d

Melinda Clarke & Deborah Young Monk: “The beauty of the whole project is that we had no idea what we were doing.”

Aug 15th, 2023 1h 23m

St Leonards map producer/founder Melinda Clarke and Melbourne illustrator Deborah Young Monk discuss their collaborations across more than three decades, how to tell an artist they need to redraw three months of work, scouting territory by car,

Neil Gower: “Twice a week I’ll make a mark on paper and think ‘I wouldn’t want to be doing anything other than what I’m doing.”

Aug 8th, 2023 52m 34s

Lewes/Berlin graphic artist and “exuberant mapmaker” Neil Gower on painting an estate plan when the grounds are unfinished, the work that gives him a “hum in the pelvis,” what Frank Zappa has in common with high-effort fake maps, an abandoned 5

Andrew Lynch: “I wish somebody else had done this, but I guess I'm gonna have to figure it out.”

Aug 2nd, 2023 1h 13m

New York City cartographer and QueensLink chief design officer Andrew Lynch on using library archives, train-mounted GoPro footage and his own two feet to plot every track in the New York City subway system, a brush with cubicle-based urban pla

Danielle Currie: “Zoom in buddy, it ain’t paint!”

Jul 26th, 2023 20m 17s

New Brunswick embroidery artist Danielle Currie discusses her fans among NASA’s Ocean Processing Group, spending more than 400 hours to render an Icelandic river in straight stitches, her hoops being mistaken for paintings, how you really have

Gabriel Camus: “That would be the dream, to make this city that never ends.”

Jul 18th, 2023 40m 28s

Toronto architect and artist Gabriel Camus discusses the 20" wide, 20 ft. long imagined cityscape he’s been drawing since 2018, a 100 ft. (!) illustration he's never seen the whole of for want of space to roll it out, the modern city as utopia/

Simon Polster: “I was hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin and spent quite a long time in the Caucasus.”

Jul 10th, 2023 29m 42s

Königs Wusterhausen mapmaker Simon Polster discusses falling into his first topo mapping project after hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin, using Soviet topographic maps as a starting point to map Armenian hiking trails, donating data to OpenStreet

Kevin Sheehan: “There’s something good about using old ways of doing things.”

Jul 3rd, 2023 44m 55s

East Yorkshire artist-cartographer Kevin Sheehan discusses picking a fight with fellow history PhDs by drawing a 19x29” calfskin portolan chart of the Mediterranean, spending 2 months stippling the lunar surface with a dip pen, acquiring a nove

Jeff Clark: “Paper maps are dead, long live paper maps.”

Jun 27th, 2023 51m 41s

Vancouver “accidental cartographer” Jeff Clark discusses his 100-layer 18-month project to map the Salish Sea bioregion, the importance of testing your waterproof trail map paper, getting a big boost from the local press, the eternal hassle of

Anthony Despalins: “I feel this energy when creating impossible landscapes, spaces, configurations.”

Jun 19th, 2023 55m

Lisbon cartographer and artist Anthony Despalins on using the visual language of French 1:50k topos to create imagined landscapes, a toolkit of pencils, poems, markers, memories and ink, drawing inspiration from the Gironde estuary and Matthew