It’s the most wonderful map of the year!
live footage of our bookcase (NG yellow)
I realise that it is rather subjective, but I was pleasantly surprised when my rssfeeds informed me that “Esri and National Geographic collaborated to produce a high-quality basemap that reflects National Geographic’s cartographic design, typographic style, and map policies”. That page already shows a few nice examples of the very typical design choices National Geographic has made.
No doubt the new mapservice is welcomed by many, specifically by educators and friends of National Geographic. The new mapservice kind of puts the National Geographic map near the Christmas tree, as one of the tweets about the launch mentioned.
This time, I get to enjoy even more than the new map: in Holland it is a good common practice for employers to thank employees with a Christmas / New Years gift. It is that kind of moment to consider how little we can achieve completely on our own and how much, if we work together to make a real difference. Since many years, Esri Nederland has a few options for these gifts, like donating your gift to a good cause (SOS Kinderdorpen or Unicef) or receiving a year’s subscription to National Geographic.
Selfishly, I have opted for the latter again. To me, National Geographic has this magnetic-like force over explorer-wannebees. The picture above, actual footage from our living room, shows how it affected us over the years. So I am really looking forward to another year of explorer stories and pictures, and National Geographic magazines and maps!
BTW, for the more technically interested: in the topright iFrame of this page, I have developed a PHP script, which randomly centers the map within a given outerframe. I will be making a nicer WordPress plugin out of this, for others (NG) map lovers. Co-creators are very welcome!