Mapping mars

 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!

Pirates and aliens

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.

Alpine Lakes permit map

 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.

 

 

Honeymoon Story Map

I've always loved the Esri Story Maps I've seen online. They're used as a visually focused and dynamic way of telling location driven stories. I made my first one of the honeymoon my husband and I took after our wedding because we traveled to a lot of different locations and I had a lot of good photos to use. It was a lot of fun and I'm excited to come up with ways to use Story Maps to deliver placed-based information and stories in the future.

United Birds of America

I've been learning to work with Ilustrator more and how shapefile data can translate in useful and fun ways from mapping software into visual editing software. I thought that my skill level in Photoshop would transfer seamlessly and although it's definitely helped, there's plenty of skills to learn that are different from Photoshop. I made this map of the US using each state's state bird plumage. I was surprised to learn that many states share the same state bird creating an interesting challenge for attempting visualize the same bird in different ways either by selecting a bird of the opposite gender, playing with scale, or selecting less glorified plumage.