News

Cartifact Wins Top Honors in Avenza Map Awards

Cartifact's map design work has won the award for “Best Map” in the Avenza Map Awards. Cartifact's entry was their Midtown to Downtown Map of Manhattan showing major markets and neighborhoods, including building level detail and local information. Cartifact's Manhattan map shows a balance of “quality and detail that we found so appealing,” said Ted Florence, president of Avenza Systems. Results of the competition, including a downloadable version of the Cartifact's winning entry, can be viewed on Avenza's website. A printed version of the Manhattan map is available through maps.com.

Cartifact joins design team for major online mapsite

Cartifact's map design work is featured in the latest upgrade of the Yahoo! online map site. The goal was to create a style distinct from other web maps in visual appeal and content, and to present cartographic information in a useful and attractive format.

Alan Brown, the programmer at Yahoo! Maps responsible for writing much of the code, states, "I worked on the implementation side of the new map styles, but a lot of the credit for the new look and feel of the map goes to Cartifact (particularly Graham Marriott and Bruce Daniel) - little details such as the colors, line widths, icons, and overall experience. Credit also goes to people in our own UED team, particularly Jane Jao. The collaboration has been a yin-yang sort of experience - they brought a level of artistic attention and creative cartographic insight that had been missing from Yahoo!'s (or anybody's else's) online maps, while we had years of technological expertise and close monitoring of users needs to make it all practical."

Cartifact contributed features not found in other online maps: more precisely defined levels of roads; shaded relief and land-cover/vegetation at higher zoom levels; and at lower levels in Manhattan and San Francisco, neighborhoods defined by color, and selected buildings color-coded and labeled.

Cartifact maps LA's Griffith Park

Cartifact is working with The L.A. City Department of Recreation and Parks and Council District 4 to create a detailed map and brochure for Griffith Park, due to be published this fall.

In light of the devastating park fire on May 8th we have included an animation showing the path of the fire.