Past winners of American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor, the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society, include National Geographic, the CIA Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which, according to Slate.com, is “basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.” The map took Imus 6,000 hours (seven days a week for two years straight) to complete.
Read more about Imus’ map here, which includes relief shading instead of the standard hypsometric tinting (darker colors for lower elevations, lighter colors for higher altitudes). This gives the map a more accurate portrait of America’s terrain.
This is terrific, I wish I knew about this before Christmas!!
It is great that paper map prints are still in use. Thanks to imusgeographics that they made people use poster maps in their walls or road maps in their cars. In the digital map era some people think that the googlemaps or the digital navigation will choose all the map need. It is not true. You can only get the most detail of a country with a map like imus map. I have heard about the map from the internet, by a newsletter. It seems that the attention to the map rised since it is an award winning map. There are many articles and news on the internet about the map, and also a pdf file with the comparisons on https://imusgeographics.com/ . As a cartographer I can say that it is a “beatiful map”, with most detailed information. I would like to have one to see the map print quality. Many political maps shows the boundaries with different colours, but it is a courage to use single green colours for the borders. Becouse there is an axpectation on the users that the boundaries will be coloured. But this green single colour makes the map easy to use. I will soon put this political map on http://www.pusulaharita.com and also map prints for sale on http://www.mapist.com.tr.