"The process of going back and forth from painting to the computer became a continuous cycle. Midway through as I became more and more familiar with the outcome of how the actual texture would appear on the screen when tiled, my painting process became more specific to achieve the desired texture, color, darkness, stroke, range of value that I wanted for each feature on the map." Lovely stuff from Geraldine on painting, textures, and process.

"I've often felt a sense of sadness that it's only the final piece that sees the light of day; there's a lightness to the experimentation that goes into the early parts of projects, when you're not worried so much about final implementation and instead can just play. We're going to start exposing some of this process, and this post is about the thinking that went into http://migration.stamen.com/, a recent project for Esquire Magazine." Lovely post from Stamen about the early stages of invention for this project.

Nice post about building your own maptiles in Tilemill. Something to return to when I have a location-specific maps problem to solve, perhaps.

Remarkable satirical maps from the First World War; the Raemaekers is especially brilliant.

"I've long held that all media transit from being "functional" to "art" when they are no longer economically viable. It is that transition which dampers the cost and the consequence of failure and makes the space necessary for people to experiment and play. Think of lithography which was born of purely utilitarian needs and sherparded the arrival of the mass-produced image only to become capital-O objects as soon as the offset press was invented." I love Aaron.

"I have made a custom Mapnik style file that's optimized for Amazon Kindle display." Pretty.

"What I am interested in is how my Rorschmap differs from those other instantiations. What I am interested in is how digitisation changes not just the format of a thing, but its fundamental essence."

Explorations in fictional geography, seeded from a deck of cards, and methodically produced over many years. A lovely film, too: careful in the way it explains Jerry's map. Brilliant.

"Rorschmap is cartographic navel-gazing, a reframing of the map. It will not help you find anything. We are bored with your squares and your margins. We want new shapes and new dimensions, the unicode snowmen of visual representation. †‡†, as the man said." I am wearing out the "James is brilliant" button on my keyboard, but I will keep pressing it as long as he does this sort of thing.

"Designers get handed a tool kit that has as many tools as a good swiss army knife, and the maps reflect these tools. Millions of people use them to make appointments across town, find restaurants, and drive home for the holidays.

But what if, instead of a swiss army knife, we used a box of crayons? Or charcoal and newsprint? Or play-doh? What would those maps look like? What could they tell us about the world?"

"Design, host and share your own custom maps." Interesting - tile hosting, tile creation.

"We’ve seen how Peak MHz capped the speed of verbs, but nouns continued to get cheaper to store and serve." This is all good, but that's a cracking sentence.

"Airport City is a slippy map of airport runways and highway on/off ramps rendered using OpenStreetMap data (OSM). ...I became fascinated with the on and off ramps, in OSM, during and still following the creation of prettymaps in 2010. To see them in isolation is to see the gravitation push and pull (the wind patterns and dance moves) of the cities they make possible." Yep, still love Aaron.

“Cartography used to be both an art and a science. I wanted to return to that.” This was my present to myself, as a souvenir, from SF. Looking forward to reading it properly - especially all the areas I never had a chance to visit - and can already confirm the maps are gorgeous. But really, it's about the whole package.

"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.

Trap streets - yes, of course. But trap rooms; trap architectures? That's iiinteresting.

Images captured via Google Streetview cameras; some are incredible, others, beautiful.

"This is the part that interests me: What happens to a person's experience of prettymaps when the echoes of their own life start to make up the map itself? What happens when the only streets on a map are those you and your friends have traveled?"

"...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography." Finally, found the Borges quotation about a map the size of the world.

"Videogames are systems, not themes, but dress a system in the right theme and you can catch the attention of someone who would not otherwise be interested. So it is for my father, who, in these awkwardly rendered moments, catches a glimpse of what I'd been seeing my entire childhood." Lovely, lovely piece of writing from Simon.

"...Bing Destination Maps [bing.com] seems quite interesting as a new way of rendering geographical maps in a more visually simplified, understandable and accessible way. In other words, imagine one can now create a sort of information-optimized summary maps, similar to those you would quickly draw yourself on the back of napkin." It is slow and a bit beta, and the loading graphic is crackers... but otherwise, this is superb.

"It’s an old “Paramount Studio map of California’s geographical facsimiles”—that is, places that can stand in for other places.

Siberia! Switzerland! Africa! What a state!"

"Maps are having their F-64 moment, right now, which is important and wonderful but I don't think anyone really wants to live in a world with an infinite depth of field. It's an appealing idea but then something like the Hipstamatic comes along and we all get irrationally weak in the knees, all over again." As usual with Aaron, I could quote most of the article, but in this case, I'll pick my favourite piece of writing, rather than perhaps the most succint quotation; just read the whole thing. (And: I wish I could code or even write like this).

"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.

"Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software." Oooh.

"We would then take the data generated from these walks and plot them into a computer representation of the area and generate visualisations from that. Building an audiogeography superimposed on the physical landscape with the sound levels as experienced by somebody who would walk through the area." Some nice work from Alper and Kars.

"John Leighton's hexagonal map only extended about 6 miles from the centre of London, but it's a relatively process to extend more concentric rings of hexes, turning the Great Wen into a setting for a boardgame, Settlers of Catan or Squad Leader re-imagined upon London." Wargaming/Catan pretty much leapt into my mind, too. I like this.

"On my todo list still is an evil twin of iamnear, designed to be difficult and disorientating in use, but rewarding in unexpected ways should you persevere with it. As Kevin Slavin recently said in his talk at the BLDGBLOG book launch: “a world and a life in which you are always the centre of the map… fuck that”."

"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.

"Strange that, in order the simulate the experience of moving without the guidance of a machine, we are granted the perspective of a god." Lee on games and perspective and HUDs and comics and maps and navigation and more. Ding.

Map of Shanghai, as Sim-City style rendered projection; is this useful? Or is this just a style of imagery computer users are used to?

"Because the ability to be in a city and to see through it is a superpower, and it's how maps should work." The maps of New York Jack's been working on for a while are now available to buy. Having seen them in the flesh, I can tell you they're properly beautiful.

"A collection of accidents that happened while working on maps and other graphics." Bloopers from interactive infographics. Delightful; the patina and happy accidents of the 21st century.

"Last night I laser-etched the top of my Eee PC with the complete level maps of Super Mario Land ( on the Game Boy)." Just beautiful. (Thanks, Offworld!)

For those of you who might not be aware of its size, James has put the size of Gaza in context through comparing it to maps of other cities. Simple, effective communication.

"See what's been discovered by the Wasteland inhabitants!" Collaborative slippymap of what people are finding in the DC Wasteland in Fallout 3.

"Uses the Flickr shapefiles to show you where the world thinks its neighbours are." Damnit I wish Tom would stop magicking up awesomeness all the time.

"Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical art project which generates walking maps for any city in the world based on remapping routes from Ulysses allowing users to create a mashup of their own walk to be shared with other users both on the Joyce Walks site and as embeddable maps on any site."

"The big dilemma is that needs are different. I’m normally on Mobile Google Maps when I’m frantically trying to find a place, often the hotel I’ve booked. I’m lost, I want to sleep – I’m not exploring the possibility space, and I don’t want to wade through marketing garbage. Note that this doesn’t make sense for these kinds of advertisers either: I’ve booked already, and I don’t want alternatives." Once again, the problems of the mobile context (rather than the mobile technology) rear their heads.

"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.

"you make a labyrinth of well-placed incisions and the city is yours. Perforated from below by robbers, it rips to pieces. The city is a maze of unrealized break-ins."

"Diaroogle helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone. It's for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience. It is also a community authored database of New York toilets."

"Snapshot provides an alternative view of listings from Trulia and was developed in collaboration with Stamen Design." Beautiful - great connection between filmstrip and main panel, and the motion blur hits the delight sensor on the head.

"For the "streetview" feature of Google Maps, the search engine's agents tour around city neighborhoods in a discreet van. Sometimes they catch more than just identifiable landmarks." In this case, they catch a drug deal in progress.

"God’s Eye View portrays four key Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth." Striking, jarring; curiously impersonal. Parting of the Red Sea is, to my mind, the best.

People draw maps and more from memory. The results are interesting to say the least, and, at times, beautiful.

"European settlers found it difficult to accept that a continent as large as Australia could have no great rivers comparable to those of Africa or North and South America." Beautiful, incorrect, cartography.

"Today we're happy to announce that we are adding support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results."

Geokit is a Rails plugin for building location-based apps. It provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation in one cohesive package.

"The map is an idealisation, a beautiful illusion of symmetry and grace. It gives form and order to the formless and disordered appearance of the capital." - Peter Ackroyd in the New Statesman, on the exhibition of London's Maps at the BL.

Awesome - Julian starts building a game of Battleships played out in the real world and Google Earth, using a mobile phone as a geolocator. It'll be interesting to see how this develops