“American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the ‘Best of Show’ award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.” So begins a detailed article by Seth Stevenson, writing for the Arts & Entertainment section of Slate.com.
Stevenson goes on to comment: “David Imus worked alone on his map [The Essential Geography of the United States of America] seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts […] This object—painstakingly sculpted by a lone, impractical fellow—is a triumph of indie over corporate. Of analog over digital. Of quirk and caprice over templates and algorithms. It is delightful to look at. Edifying to study. And it may be the last important paper map ever to depict our country.”
While Imus took top honors for the 38th CaGIS Map Competition, three UCSB Geography alumni also made their marks by taking Honorable Mentions in the Interactive/Digital category. Mamata Akella (BA, 2006; now part of the ESRI Mapping Team) was part of a team that received an honorable mention for their ESRI World Topographic Map Viewer, and Kirk Goldsberry (PhD, 2007; now at Michigan State University) and Sarah Battersby (PhD, 2006; now at the University of South Carolina) took similar honors for their creation of the Michigan Department of Community Health Atlas of Health Facilities.
The purpose of the annual CaGIS Map Design Competition is “to promote interest in map design and to recognize significant design advances in cartography. The focus of this competition is design; therefore, judging is based on cartographic design criteria, such as creativity, text (spelling and grammar, too), balance, unity, clarity, use of color, and subject matter.” The Cartography and Geographic Information Society announced the 39th Annual Map Design Competition earlier this year. The competitions are open to all mapmakers in the United States and Canada for maps completed or published during the previous year. Students are particularly encouraged to apply for the awards sponsored by the National Geographic Society and Avenza-MAPublisher. (The deadline for 39th annual competition was January 27, 2012.)
