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neck of the woods | prof ile

RAVEN

MAPS

with Stuart Allan and
Michael Beard

steve boyarsky by ezra marcos

Q – HOW DID YOU DISCOVER AN INTEREST
IN CARTOGRAPHY AND MAPS?

STUART – I saw the huge wall map of California
and the San Francisco Bay on the Ferry Building wall
as a kid in the late 40s. People were just captivated by
that map. I was too.

MICHAEL - I was interested in maps too, but not in
the same way as Stuart was. I just liked to zone out
and go someplace on the map without having to go
anywhere. And then I ran into Stuart. He always had
interesting projects going on, and it occurred to me
so that we might actually be able to sell them.

Q – HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE MAP
MAKING BUSINESS?

MICHAEL - We were both doing other things.
Stuart was in the cartography business. He developed
a digital poster of the San Francisco Bay Area that
was cartographic in nature. I thought, there might be
some other people who’d like that too. My father was
a pilot and fascinated by maps. That was my introduc-
tion to this part of the business.

STUART - Dynamic Graphics was selling a high-
end software package to oil exploration firms. They
wanted a promotional piece, and they picked us to
produce it. We created a poster from their computer
plots: Mount St. Helens, the mountain before and
after the eruption, ringed by smaller views from eight
points on the compass. That was not a conventional
map, but it made the point that geographic features
can be shown in vivid and interesting ways. A few
years later we were making the state map art series.

40 www.southernoregonmagazine.com | summer 2020