Six years ago I drew coastlines and trail networks. Now I spend most weeks turning blockchain data into maps: where the validators actually sit, how value moves between chains rendered as something a human can read. The work is still cartography. The clients just pay in stablecoins. That last part broke my company card before […]
Open a map on your phone from two different countries and you may be looking at two different worlds. The same border shows up solid in one place. In another it’s dashed, or dotted, or gone entirely. That difference is one of the most delicate jobs in cartography, and it usually happens without anyone noticing. […]
The romantic version of independent map and travel work is all field notebooks and dawn light over a mountain pass. The real version has a lot more spreadsheets in it. If you make maps, sell prints, guide trips, or publish travel stories for a living, your customers are scattered across a dozen countries, and each […]
For 7 days I put my phone’s navigation away. No blue dot, no calm voice telling me to turn left in 500 feet, no live traffic. Just a folded paper road map of my region, a smaller city street map, and whatever I could remember. I wanted to know what I’d traded away when I […]
Say the name of the town you grew up in out loud. Really listen to it. There’s a decent chance it’s a fossil, a word carried forward from people who lived on that land long before anyone alive can remember, in a language most of the locals no longer speak. Place names are the most […]
Somewhere on an old map of your city there might be a street that was never paved, a lane that leads nowhere, a bend in a road no car ever took. It was put there on purpose, to catch a thief. They’re called trap streets. A cartographer draws a fake feature into a map, something […]
Pick up any wall map of the world, the kind that hung in your classroom, and look at Greenland. It sits up near the top, huge and pale, roughly the size of Africa. Now go check the numbers. Africa is about 14 times larger. Greenland could fit inside it with room left over for India, […]