Category Archives: 365DaysOfMaps

Read a Road Map Day (95/365)

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The irony – it’s Read a Road Map day. Not ‘Blindly stick an address into a car’s satnav system and follow turn directions’ or ‘Use Google maps’. This is a day to celebrate maps. You know, maps on paper, in road atlases’ the sort of product that not only invited curiosity for the places you were to visit, but also the places along the journey. Satnav killed all that. It also killed the requirement for people to be able to read a map, even in a basic sense.

So i thought I’d see if AI can create some form of generic road map and show how it might be used as an educational tool. I chose an imaginary place largely because AI still hallucinates placename spelling. If the places are imaginary then the way they are spelt is the way they are spelt. That said, there’s still a few hallucinations in what follows.

Anyway, it’s passable, but only on the correct side, at the right speed. The irony? 100% AI created without any paper or real roads to generate the look of a paper product, using a computer. Meta.

Read a Road Map map

Original Prompt (Google Gemini)

I need a map that could be used to promote “Read a Road Map” day. The map itself must look like a road map and contain all of the typical features you’d expect in a road atlas. Crucially it needs to direct people in how to read the map so it should be educational.

404 Day (94/365)

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How do you ‘celebrate’ a day that’s all about the perils of internet censorship and lack of availability in different places from the country-level down to schools, libraries, and homes.

The most obvious would have been to make this web page default to a 404 which would be exactly what you’d expect to see. But instead let’s forego that obvious gag and, instead, make a map that identifies where in the world is the world closed. We can throw some gags onto the map instead.

World not Found map

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

I need a map of the world to celebrate 404 day, a day used to reflect on the problems of censorship on the internet. I need the map to be heavily sarcastic and play into the idea of Page 404 being somewhere you land if something’s missing. Maybe use this concept as a basis for a map showing censored regions across the world. Go for it!

World Marbles Day (93/365)

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It’s Good Friday but that’s boring so what else is on the list for today…Tweed Day, Fishfingers and Custard Day, Aquatic Animal Day. Nah – it’s World Marbles Day!

It’s been a while since I actually played marbles but I recall many an hour in the school playground trying to beat my friends, and show off some sought after marble or other. The trade in marbles was almost as important as the game itself.

Today celebrates the rich history and joy that the simple game of marbles brings. And also commemorates the very first tournament held on Tinsley Green, England in 1588 where two competitors fought for the hand of a milk maiden.

Marbles map

Original Prompt (Google Gemini)

Can you draw me a map of world marbles day, maybe as a two hemisphere map poster with each hemisphere of the globe illustrated like marbles. Please include the polar regions as separate marble insets

National Ferret Day (92/365)

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Apparently ferrets are not quarrelsome, tetchy, amoral, and prone to biting. They are apparently highly intelligent and make great companions. And they have their very own day that celebrates such character. And today is that very day so grab your flat cap, and your Whippet, and take your pet ferret to the local race.

Ferret racing has been a staple at fairs and rural festivals in England for many a year. Ferrets are positioned in pipes and the crowd bet on which ferret makes it through the pipes first. So – it’s really just another activity that supports betting really. Horses, ferrets…whatever.

Ferret map

Original Prompt (Google Gemini)

Please create a map showing the locations of well-known ferret races in England

US Officially Renames Entire World! (91/365)

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This morning, President Grump decided to rename every country in the world.

According to his Poop Social post, he didn’t want to, but many tremendously successful, well not as bigly successful people as him, but moderately successful people, had been saying he should and begging hi to. So he decided to make it happen to honor his very own great country, which as the best President in the history of all Presidents, not even just US Presidents, but even of US Steel Presidents, who are very strong by default, though not as strong as President DJ Grump.

The Gulf of America was just a start. In fact, leaders of many great countries around the world had been asking DJ Grump to give their countries new names. He couldn’t believe it, but they did… so he obliged. (In fact, many of these same leaders are already calling to thank him for doing so today, if you believe it or not, and of course, if you don’t believe it, it’s because you have Grump-derangement syndrome, but you can’t save everyone… just ask my E.Ron Tusk.)

The map below map represents the new official United States GNIS for every country around the world. Databases will need to be updated.

In a Poop Social message from the Porcelain Office this morning, President Grump congratulated all countries of the world for their new, tremendously wonderful, bigly names.

 

View Map Here

Prompt Used to Create this Map

I would like to make a map for April Fool’s Day.

The title should be “President DJ Grump’s Vision of the World”

I’m attaching a simplified world countries map to use.

# Intent
To mock President Grump as a fool, honestly. But even more pejoratively, to make fun of his nascent narcissism and insatiable ego.

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Happy Crayon Day! (90/365)

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Many of my first maps were drawn with crayon. And perusing the Children’s Map Exhibit at the International Cartographic Conference every two years, others continue to follow suit.

So I thought for Crayon Day, I would skip the interactive map trend and just ask Google Gemini Image Creator to create a crayon map as might be drawn by an 11 or 12 year-old, Generation Alpha kid today, highlighting all the chaos and conflict in the world. A pre-teen angst map, of sorts.

I guided it a bit in my prompt for sure, but what it came up with seemed alright. Though, I might put a grumpy face in the US too.

Happy Crayon Day!

P.S. It will be interesting to see which kids figure out how to use AI to produce amazing maps of the world for the next ICC Children’s Map Contest (Poland 2027).

I suspect we’ll see some truly amazing children’s maps… and if they prompted them into creation… I say it’s still art. But I doubt everyone will agree with me. 😉 We certainly live in interesting times!

A crayon map of the world as drawn by a 12 year-old today.

Prompt Used in Google Gemini Image Creator

Tomorrow is Crayon Day. Please draw a map of the world in Crayola-style crayon texture and colors that looks like it was drawn by a precocious and semi-talented sixth-grader. The crayon map of the world must be drawn entirely in crayon and should highlight major countries (no names included) as well as have added pictographs (again, drawn in crayon) of tense and stressful world events and conflicts, including everything from melting icecaps, to global warming, to overfishing, to arms buildups between NATO and Russia, war in Ukraine, Iran, West Bank, Israel, Venezuela, conflicts and tensions in the South China Sea, Taiwan, between the Koreas, authoritarian leaders, an oil ship trying to reach Cuba, US aircraft carriers in the Indians Ocean, an American flag unsuccessfully trying to be planted in Greenland, and any other things you can think of around the world to fill in simple pictographs about stressful, tense situations where there are blank spaces.

Bipolar Day Cartographic Style (89/365)

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Bipolar disorder is a real thing and nothing to mock. It impacts millions around the world, including several distant relatives and in-laws of mine. So I’m not mocking this disease.

However, I do get a little tired of mapping global- or state-based epidemiological datasets. And the fact that bipolar can be turned into a cartographic pun was just too tempting to resist.

So I present to you the Cartographic Bipolar Day Map!

This one was a bit of a mess. Originally I wanted an Equal Earth projection that would rotate with the labels representing themselves right-side up, so to speak, even with south at the top.

This proved difficult from a technical standpoint. With very weird rendering errors using Equal Earth and D3. After several attempts back and forth with the LLM, I asked it if it would be much easier to just do it with Web Mercator, to which my assistant responded: “Oh, hell yes!” (I’ve asked my assistant to swear a lot so it better resembles working with someone I’d enjoy working with, as I only trust people who swear… a lot… but I digress.)

I gave it permission to use Web Mercator and some obnoxious raster base map just for fun, and alas… about a minute later we had a map.

Yes, I could spend my weekend perfecting this gimmicky map for a handful of “likes” on LinkedIn, I suppose, but the weather is abnormally warm in Minnesota right now, so I’d rather go outside and cut down some dying pine trees. Tornado season is coming… I figure I won’t be able to make maps, prompted or otherwise, if there is a 20 meter-long tree trunk dissecting my office.

View Map Here

Original Prompt

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Happy Piano Day! (88/365)

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Happy Piano Day!

The 88th day of every year is considered Piano Day by… pianists? Not sure. But it’s official, so I made a map for it.

When I saw this day on the calendar, I was reminded of the great Mùm song “We have a map of the piano.” I remember designing Macromedia Flash maps to this song back in the early 2000s. So I thought…

What if the map was the piano?

This one was fun to make. I decided to use a single prompt and provide no dataset or anything. And it worked!

Today’s map is a piano. Every country is a note from the piano. Bigger countries by area are the more commonly played white keys. Each key has at least two countries associated with it.

You can play songs by tapping countries. To get you started, I also designed a couple of popout panels to offer a handful of post-copyright songs with notes, so you can practice playing map melodies.

A piano is nothing more than a map of sounds… here we replace keys with countries.

View Map Here

Conversation

View the entire Web Mapper conversation – one prompt and an output you can copy-paste yourself.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69c5f472-5a38-832f-b981-79fcdb1db1c1

Happy Celebrate Weeds Day! (87/365)

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Happy Celebrate Weeds Day!

At first I figured this was some inside joke for people who love marijuana. Surely, someone had to be stoned to come up with National Weeds Day where people celebrate weeds, right? But the other option was National Triglycerides Day and well…

I spend most of my free time in the summer killing off a tree-sized weed, common buckthorn, which has invaded the upper Midwest since being imported from Europe. It kills most of the undergrowth in our forests here, so I figured I might as well map and learn what other, smaller types of weeds there are to keep an eye out for.

My weed map doesn’t seem to load quickly right now.

I blame the insanely large dataset from the USDA… or maybe… just maybe, it’s the curse of the dead buckthorn?! 😮

Map of invasive plants in the US

View Map Here

Web Mapper GPT Prompt (7m26s response)

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Happy Theatre Day! (86/365)

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Happy Theatre (or Theater?) Day!

Today’s map is a bit weird. I decided to ask Perplexity to create a dataset of renowned playwrights from different countries that are perhaps not famous but have done work that has received awards or is known internationally.

I get tired of English, so I asked the playwright’s description in their preferred or native language. So you won’t be able to read about all of them necessarily, but you’ll be able to see their names and famous plays in English — if you speak English.

Anyway, the map is kind of simple aside from the fact that the countries are filled with their playwright’s bios and may languages are represented herein.

This one took a brief follow-up prompt because originally the bios weren’t contained/masked by the country boundaries and running amok. A couple of follow-up lines straightened things out and I’m off working on tomorrow’s map which… is so much fun! 🙂

Also, Perplexity ran out of gas when creating the dataset, and I didn’t really care that much, but you’ll notice a few larger populated countries missing from the final map… i.e., France and the US.

View Map Here

Tools Used

  • Perplexity: data collection
  • Web Mapper: map creation

Web Mapper Prompt

Hi, I would like to make a map for Theater Day on Friday, May 27. I have collected a JSON dataset of famous playwrights from around the world. Each of their descrdiptions is in their native language, for fun. I am wondering if you can do the following: Please create an Equal Earth projection map with the title “All the world is a stage…” in the upper-left-hand section. Then, as a subtitle: “Highly regarded playwrights from around the world.” — Using the provide JSON dataset, please join it to a countries geometry dataset. Use medium gray boundaries for the countries. White background with the playwright’s description (in their native language) filling the entire country at a random angle between 45 degrees and 67 degrees (where zero degrees is at the top and 90 degrees is standard left-to-right horizontal text). The text should be light gray and turn to bright crimson red when the user hovers over a country. For countries without playwright listed, or incomplete data, simply create a country with a very light gray fill. No base map needed. Just the countries. When a user selects a country, have a beautiful, minimalist popup appear with the details about the Playwright and all the information, with a scroll bar. Have hte Playwright’s name as the title. Use 85% black for the text. White background, no transparency. A very minimalist map with beautiful text-based fill from their bio, descriptions, etc. If you have any questions or run into any issues, please let me know. On mobile devices make sure the map fills the window and is centered vertically. Also make sure it can only be viewed in landscape mode. Allow zoom up to 5 times the full extent. Do not let people pan outside of hte map or zoom out into space. On mobile make the title a header across the top, minimal. On the desktop version, have it float over the map in the lower lefthand corner, quite large. Add an info button next to the title. When a user clicks it, a modal opens with the a source showing the APIs used, link to a provenance file, and a link to the JSON file used to create this map. Give credit to Web Mapper GPT and Ian Muehlenhaus. Thanks.