Cool Maps

[Anush Faigley]

Asyou can see, instead of outlining my build with flat walls, I extended my walls by two, and added more wall on top (using a higher layer) to make an illusion of a 3d wall! This can really improve your builds and make them a bit more unique.

We can still use the picture above. Look at the water under the pillars! There is a bit of a shadow I used with tinted barriers to show them going into the water, giving the maps more depth. You call also see that the shadow gets shorter the closer it is to land, which also highlights the lake going down the further you go towards the middle.

Early in 2023, I had the great pleasure of completing a really awesome commission: a map of the career of one of my childhood heroes, wildlife writer extraordinaire Sy Montgomery! (I also got to interview her for this newsletter).

The map has over 30 custom-made points showing the sites of Sy's travels and writing, with each point clickable to pull up a book summary and/or excerpt. There's also a background layer showing all the countries Sy has visited.

The ever-amazing Inflation Reduction Act created lots of new tax credit incentives for Americans to switch to cleaner vehicles and home appliances, but it can be confusing to navigate. In 2023, the state of Maine published a booklet providing a guide to the IRA benefits available, plus preexisting Efficiency Maine benefits.

Through grants and direct support\u202Fto municipal and tribal governments, the Maine Community Resilience Partnership assists communities to reduce carbon emissions, transition to clean energy, and become\u202Fmore resilient to climate change effects such as extreme weather, flooding, rising sea levels, public health impacts, and more.

Since the program was\u202F first announced by Governor Mills in December 2021, some 174 cities, towns and Tribal governments in Maine have chosen to participate in the Partnership. Since inception, the program has awarded nearly $6.1 million to 103 communities.

In early 2023, I conducted a data update for the Blue Tech Clusters of America Story Map1, which I\u2019d previously created in 2021 with SustainaMetrix for The Ocean Foundation as a data-rich presentation to support their efforts to convince the U.S. Congress to provide more support to ocean science R&D. Among other changes, one of the major maps showed \u201Cthe Ocean Economy\u201D as it overlapped with each U.S. Congressional District, and since 2021 congressional district boundary lines had changed, so I remade the map with the 2023 congressional district boundary lines.

I really enjoyed working with the Maine CDC and Maine Governor\u2019s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future to create the first-ever Maine Climate Impact Dashboard, a compendium of maps and data visualizations detailing current and potential future impacts of climate change in Maine.

This dashboard tracks numerical targets included in Maine Won\u2019t Wait (the Maine state climate plan) to inform the public and help evaluate whether evidence-based adjustments, enhancements or replacements to policies are needed in pursuit of the plan's climate objectives. Over time, the dashboard is intended to expand to include additional metrics as updated data becomes available, new programs are established, and state and federal climate investments are realized.

Like most of my maps, the majority of the maps in this dashboard are clickable for more information: if you select a specific town or county or icon or whatever\u2019s the focus of the map, you get a pop-up with details about it. This is a great way to make a lot of data publicly available, but in a format more friendly and interactive than a spreadsheet that lets people easily find and click on their points of interest.

PamPam, Felt, and Proxi are new tools that make it easier to create, share, and publish attractive online maps. You can use them to visualize itineraries, map out your favorite restaurants, or for data journalism projects. Whipping up maps has gotten faster, more visual and more fun. Read on for examples and ideas for how to make the most of these services.

Chloropleth maps let you color-code a map based on how common something is in a particular place. This works for showing things like regional incidence of a disease, geographic breakdown of voting, or income by location.

Locator maps let you drop pins on a map to spotlight particular locations. This works well to show a few specific spots impacted by something, wheelchair accessible subway stops, or the places most impacted by a new policy.

It\u2019s super easy to create a new map by importing a list of places. You can paste in anything from your clipboard, or a Google My Maps link, an Airtable database, or any link that has places on it.

\u201CIf a friend asks you for recommendations, you're likely to send those in a text. But that's not visual, interactive and of course, spatial,\u201D Helena Jaramillo, PamPam\u2019s co-founder, told me last month when the site opened to the public. \u201CWith PamPam, you can share an interactive map in the same amount of time it would take you to write the text.\\\"

Felt is a modern, collaborative map-making tool that\u2019s more advanced and complex than PamPam. The browser-based platform allows you to create, annotate, modify, and visualize data. You can import just about any kind of map data \u2014 like KML, CSV, Excel, Zip or GeoJSON files. And you can share what you create privately or publicly for free.

Datawrapper makes it easy to create your own maps whether you have a small list of places or a gigantic data set. You don\u2019t need any technical skills to use it. And it\u2019s easy to make something look nice even if you\u2019re not a designer. Datawrapper\u2019s map descriptions can help you figure out which kind of map to create. Pricing: Free for almost all use.

Google My Maps lets you make a map to share from your existing Google account. It\u2019s easy to use, but doesn\u2019t have the advanced features or Felt or the social and design elements in Proxi or PamPam.

Create map-driven stories by highlighting where a series of events occurred, like the most expensive football transfers. StoryMap is part of a great suite of tools from Northwestern\u2019s Knight Lab. Here\u2019s my post on why they\u2019re worth trying.

Hot and humid summer weather can cause heat illness and even death. To measure neighborhoods that are the most at risk during extreme heat, NYC Health and Columbia University developed the New York City Heat Vulnerability Index, or HVI. We used this data to direct new cooling elements to the places that need them most, making sure that we can serve more residents in need during extreme heat events.

During the summer, we offer the chance to cool off at beaches, pools, and spray showers. Visit our Beaches and Outdoor Pools pages to find swimming hours. We also turn on the sprinklers at hundreds of playgrounds across the city! In general, we turn on spray showers on days when the temperature reaches 80 degrees or higher.

Each year, we turn on thousands of drinking fountains across the city, including more than 950 in areas of high need. Many of our drinking fountains are accessible, and some are designed for bottle refill--and we even have drinking fountains for your pet! Use our map to find the perfect drinking fountain in your area.

The NYC Department of Environmental Protection helps keep our city safe from fires and water waste by regulating fire hydrant spray caps that are used during heat emergencies. Hydrants can be opened legally with a City-approved spray cap.

LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.

Instead of a map, think about business models and analytical frameworks. The Five Forces (or PESTEL, SWOT, 7S, etc) becomes the reality. We start to make really bad decisions because we don't see the risks of the territory unless they are on the map (think about the taxi industry pre and post ride share, or Blockbuster when Reed Hastings offered to sell Netflix to them).

3a8082e126