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neck of the woods | prof ile

Q - WHAT DO PEOPLE TELL YOU THAT THEY LOVE ABOUT
YOUR MAPS?

MICHAEL – For a lot of people, it’s for the decoration. On the One
World map you can find every capital city in the world even though it
doesn’t have political boundaries. We were showing details that allow
people to see what’s important and interesting about the earth. My
mother liked One World because it was pretty. But I remember her
saying once, “Oh, I didn’t know about the Tibetan plateau.” She first
saw it on the map, and she was struck by it.

STUART - What we’re really known for is that combination of eleva-
tions and shaded relief. We also publish maps that just show shaded
relief and that’s very striking. For example, that California map on the
wall just shows shaded relief. Not everyone cares about the fine points
of landforms, but for those who do, it’s a wonderful map. Most people
prefer the combination of shading and elevation colors. That combina-
tion gives a better sense of the whole geography.

MICHAEL - A lot of people who grew up in California saw our
map and would say, “Oh, that’s what they mean by the Central Valley.”
They’d heard Central Valley on the weather report every night of their
life and driven through it, but it hadn’t even occurred to them that it is
a huge basin. It’s not really a valley, it’s a structural basin that collects
the water from the Sierras. Our maps makes that easy to grasp.

Q - WHAT LED YOU TO CREATE NIGHT VIEW MAPS?

STUART - If you’re interested in settlement geography, you can show
settlements as one category in a land cover map, along with forests,
farmland, and mountains. But if you show just light from settlements,
you will see detail and patterns that you will never see in any other map.
The Night View Maps are kind of severe, not as pretty in a living room,
but very dramatic. Night View maps show a fascinating perspective.

Q - HOW DID YOU MAKE MAPS BEFORE DIGITAL
TECHNOLOGY AND COMPUTERS?
STUART - By hand. It was basically a form of engraving for the
linework, and then photomechanical imaging of additional layers in
vacuum frames using carbon-arc lights. We had a mechanical punch
system and stable film polyester that would not stretch and shrink and
change dimension. That’s the key to color printing; they were working
on it from the 16th century on, but they just didn’t have any practical
way to do it. It was really developed fully in this country in World
War II. A map might involve 30 or 40 pieces of heavy polyester film at
full size. Each one would have some element of the map, a photome-
chanical layer for each color or typeset. They fit because each layer was
pre-punched. Then you worked on them by hand forever. You put them
back together, you do a proof, you discover where your mistakes are,
you go back to do it, you’re going to have a thousand hours in a map
like that. But that’s how it was done. It’s impressive. It’s completely
different now, it’s all on computers. It’s still demanding work, but it
calls for a different set of skills.
44 www.southernoregonmagazine.com | summer 2020