You can download Mars elevation data from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) project at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory: uahirise.org. I took this data and generated a hillshade layer to give it a 3D effect and then colorized elevation data to match the way Mars looks. So it looks like a photo of the surface but it's not!
I got a hold of some real pirate data which I stylized in a storybook pirate way. It shows locations of acts of piracy within 100 nautical miles of the Caribbean Islands.
The National UFO Reporting center manages GIS point data for locations of UFOs seen in the US. They're still collecting this information but the data that I got only went to 2005.
I've been looking at Wilderness boundaries a lot the past year for work. I thought it would be fun to make a map clipped to the strange boundaries of the Wilderness area I work in. It's very apparent where the roads are that dictated the area's starfish shape. I used colors inspired by our permits.
