Daniel Huffman

Oh man, I don't think I remembered spelling it two different ways on that assignment. Looks like OE is the right way.

Thanks for sharing! Love those 3D pie charts. Peak early 2000s.

My main memory of Zip drives was watching a lot of people in college lose work that was stored on them when the disks inevitably failed.

A map of Michigan (with an overly detailed coastline), highlighting official viticultural areas.

A simple reference map of Arizona, with counties labeled, along with a few rivers and cities and roads.

A map of the Kalamazoo River watershed. There's a hillshade in the background tinted based on vegetation data. Cities and tributaries are shown.

A bunch of green polygons with black outlines and numbers in each — neighborhoods of Kalamazoo, MI.

Some old things I made in 2006–08 (wish I could track down some of the even older ones). I like cartographers sharing their early works. Both to celebrate how far each of us has grown, and also to show newcomers that we all start our journey from a modest point.

Wow this is a good time to not have owned a car for the last 18½ years.

He's that guy who killed his wife, right?

Thank You for the Kind Words - Daniel P. Huffman, somethingaboutmaps YouTube video by NACIS

It occurs to me I never shared the video of my #nacis2025 talk. It's eight minutes of me musing about how to deal with the challenge of accepting praise from colleagues.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zvt...

I mean, I'm guessing it is. I haven't watched it, and October was a long time ago.

A framed mockup of a Rhode Island stream map. The state is green, with surrounding states in tan tones. The rivers are dark blue and are labeled with their names as well as cities along the way. Everything is done in 45° angles and the design language of a transit map.

A detail image of the map, showing the area of the Pawtuxet River.

A low-angle detail image of the map, showing the area around Providence.

If you enjoy both #RhodeIsland and #rivers, stop by The Map Center (@mapcenter.com) to check out (and maybe buy?) this poster I designed for them, showing the state's streams in the style of a transit network map.

I say "formal" because I still consider myself an educator even if I don't have a teaching job. So much cartography knowledge is imparted outside of classrooms. When any of us posts a tutorial, meets with a mentee, or answers a colleague's question, we are acting as a cartography educator.

Listing job postings I've seen recently in mapping, cartography, and journalism. If you have others to share, please comment and add them to the list ❤️ GIS Industry Solutions Manager - National... Listing job postings I've seen recently in mapping, cartography, and journalism. If you have others to share, please comment and add them to the list ❤️ GIS Industry Solutions Manager - National Map...

I put together a list of recent job postings in the mapping and journalism space, please add more as you find them!

www.linkedin.com/posts/lauren...

It's been years since I've been a formal cartography instructor, but I've been having fun lately teaching. In the last four weeks, I've (A) done Q&As with two cartography classes and (B) delivered a 1½–2hr crash course in cartographic design principles to an anthropology classroom and to a company.

An image of a map titled "The Physical World," showing landforms of the world in an unusual, highly interrupted projection designed to be vexing.

An image of an award certificate from the 53rd Annual CaGIS Map Design Competition, announcing me as the winner of the "Other" category.

Pleased (and mildly surprised) to report that this is now an *award-winning* monstrosity. It's a good thing there's an "Other" category.

somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2025/04/10/a...

State of the mapper: things are slowly getting more normal. And, after months of having no map-related thoughts outside client needs, I've finally started getting small bits of inspiration again. I even recently made a (simple) map for fun (first in a long time). bsky.app/profile/pina...

A mosaic of images from the past week: a thumbnail image for a surrealist map film, a product photo for a map-themed fountain pen, and a set of icons for online maps.

This week on The Map Room:

Pinhead Map Icons
www.maproomblog.com/2026/02/pinh...

‘The Most Amazing Map Exhibition Ever Mounted’
www.maproomblog.com/2026/02/the-...

‘And Then the Bots Came’
www.maproomblog.com/2026/02/and-...

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Oh, I know. It's an unfortunately common one in many datasets, alas.

A map of North America, with tan land and white country boundaries. Several bodies of water have been filled in and are shown as land, including the Great Lakes, James Bay, Salish Sea, Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of St. Lawrence, and more.

Taking this a bit farther. Here I've filled in many more bodies of water that are smaller than the Great Lakes. If the lakes are too small to show, then surely the Gulf of Maine is, as well ;)

(To head off a misreading of my tone: this is all in good fun, not an angry obsession).

A simply QGIS screenshow showing countries. The Great Lakes are not shown, but the US-Canada border through the lakes is. They simply appear to be land.

Another QGIS screenshot. The Gulf of California and the Salish Sea have each been shown as land, rather than water, just as the Great Lakes often are.

Pet peeve: maps that are missing the Great Lakes. They are larger than several of the various other water features that are seen on this QGIS screenshot of Natural Earth data. For comparison, I've filled in the Gulf of California and Salish Sea.

An almanac salesman stood knocking intently
at Old Man Terrapin’s shell.

#WishlistWednesday

I sometimes have to write blurbs about my work, and it's a real struggle. I think many creators make it up well after they created the work, and only because a gallery/publisher didn't think "I dunno, I made it that way because I thought it looked neat?" was a good enough blurb.

A full view of Landforms of Michigan. The state is in various shades of green, while other areas are more grey and muted. Terrain can clearly be seen via shaded relief. At this scale most of the labels can't really be read.

A detail view of the poster, showing the northern portion of Lake Michigan around the Beaver Archipelago.

Another detail of the map, showing the area around the Straits of Mackinac. The variations in terrain here, from hilly moraines to flat plains, can clearly be seen.

Monday #Map: Landforms of Michigan (2020; but mostly made in 2014–15). Still one of my favorites. Most of the work was in trying to find reasonable toponyms. Full download here: somethingaboutmaps.com/Landforms-of...

If I did this over, I'd do it for the Great Lakes in general, not just one state.

We visualize the Olympic medal count as Norwegian-style scarf. :) 📊
Check out how Germany looks like and generate your own scarf – including download of the knitting pattern.

I guess "new" is inaccurate. It's about 350 million years old.

A large Petoskey stone, about 6½ inches in diameter. It is irregular in shape, and has a hollow depression that allows it to be a shallow bowl or dish.

The underside of the bowl. It is covered in the typical "eyes" of a Petoskey stone. The bowl's shape is roughly triangular.

Just arrived: my beautiful new Petoskey stone bowl/dish, from Devonian Coast (devonian-coast.com). I live in Wisconsin, but I remain a Michigander at heart.

I should have read the update about what was new in the latest edition!

A monochrome wireframe model of a Klein bottle.

A popup showing alt text for the Klein bottle, which reads :"A 3D model of a male genitalia is displayed on a white background. AI generated content."

A warning for Adobe #InDesign users. I recently updated my copy, and after preparing a document, the recipient of that document sent me the alt text that popped up on one of their figures. Apparently, by default, InDesign uses AI to generate (often hilariously wrong) alt text for images.

I've been slowly giving this old series a facelift, and I'm proud to be able to have them hosted in the @transitmap.net store!

New additions to the print store – four amazing new maps in @pinakographos.bsky.social's "Rivers of North America" series – the Mississippi and Colorado watersheds, and Northern California and Southern New England.

transitmap.net/store/produc...

Diagram showing “Understanding” (blue) and “Execution” (orange) over time. For most of history, they rise together from the same point. After a dashed horizontal line labeled as the present, execution curves upward more steeply than understanding. Text reads: “With AI, execution increasingly outpaces understanding” and “For most of history, what we could do was evidence of what we understood.”

using LLMs for certain types of coding tasks has made me crank output faster but I can actively feel my understanding and my sense of craftsmanship diminishing, and I don't like that feeling at all

A monochrome map of the United States. Fairly visually simple. The main interest is that the states are labeled with IPA transcriptions of their names.

A detail of the map, showing the central Atlantic coast.

A #map doodle: International Phonetic Alphabet transcription of US state names (which I sourced from here: hadarshemesh.com/magazine/how...)

Thanks for the opportunity! I look forward to the next series getting in front of audiences :)