noise to signal

Time to show off something from the day job

As many of you know, my day job is as a software designer/interaction designer/product designer (so many bad names, so few good ones) at Microsoft. Part of my job for the last several years has been doing map design for the Virtual Earth team.

I'm not a trained cartographer, but it turned out that I have a pretty good set of skills for it — a strong sense of visual hierarchy, a head for complexity, and good background in the technical aspects of image display technologies. I've also been fortunate to work with a terrific set of programmers who are great at coming up with innovative solutions to the design problems I pose for them.

One of those design problems, which I've been driving for a couple of years now, has been to try to come as close as possible to the aesthetic qualities of paper maps, while still maintaining the usefulness and readability necessarily for online mapping tasks. Which is a nerdy way of saying "Make them look awesome but don't screw things up."

Today we finally released one of the big milestones we've been working towards, which means I get to toot our collective horn.

Here's the competition's map of Mt. Rainier national park. It's fine, but a little low on detail.

Here's our standard road map style, which was all that was available until today. We add the peaks, so you know where the mountain the park is named after actually is, and our labels have a bit more visual hierarchy applied.

And here's the version that went live on our site today. Yay! Hill-shaded maps!

Here are some other highlights to get you started looking around:

• The lava dome at Mt. St. Helens


• Sand Hill country in Nebraska


• Mt. Kilimanjaro


• The island of Viti Levu in Fiji