Something I love about map making is how many ways there are to get started. You can draw one by hand (many of our maps start as a hand sketch), use a service like Google Maps and graphic design software to add your points of interest, doodle on top of a printed map and scan it in, the list can go on and on.
To make the kind of detailed maps we make we turn to GIS: Geographic Information Systems. There are a few different GIS options out there, Esri’s Arc is perhaps the most famous one. We primarily use QGIS because it’s open source software, and extremely capable as a professional GIS product. This means the users are free to use, dismantle, study, and distribute the software without any further explicit consent from the creators. To practice open source cartography, then, means we use as much open source software as we can as we create the end products we ship to you, and then give you the same freedoms when you buy a digital or physical good from us.
(more…)
