NACIS 2020

Cartography in Adobe CC - MAPublisher and Geographic Imager Advancements
Presenter: Nick Burchell, Avenza Systems Inc.
This presentation will provide an overview of advancements in MAPublisher and Geographic Imager since the last NACIS conference. Topics will include how to work with the new Spatial Join and Line Plotter tools in MAPublisher for Illustrator, and how you can solve complex workflows through the import and export of geospatially aware vectors in Photoshop with Geographic Imager.

It's Finally Here! Maps for Adobe and ArcGIS Pro Integration
Presenter: Sarah Bell, Esri
In 2015, I gave my very first NACIS talk on a fun mapping tool prototype we were calling ArcGIS Maps for Adobe CC, co-presented with Clint Loveman. Over the past 5 years, this prototype has grown from a plug-in prototype for bringing online GIS data into Adobe Illustrator to a robust mapping & design tool with features such as data visualization & data filtering, labeling - and much more! In Spring 2020, we released Maps for Adobe 2.0 - an upgrade that allows users to open their ArcGIS Pro-created maps into Illustrator, with layering, labeling, and styling preserved. In this talk, I will demonstrate this new 2.0 feature, along with a lot of additional cartography tools that we've added to Maps for Adobe.

The Business of Printing Maps and the Pull of the Blank Canvas
Presenter: Anton Thomas, Anton Thomas Art
Five years to hand-draw a big map of North America. Another year to grasp the business of printing it from Australia. Then, as I finally launched, a global crisis cast every aspect of fulfilment into uncertainty. The pre-orders rolled in, and what would’ve been challenging in ordinary times was intensified to the extreme. The experience was exhilarating, stressful, and wildly unfamiliar. Through that story I will discuss releasing a map in print. And then, how does one move on after years immersed in a project? With new maps (of course)! I look forward to introducing my new project - Wild World.

Aiding or Abetting? Encouraging Informed Mapping During a Global Pandemic
Presenters: Kelsey Taylor and Megan Danielson, Mapbox
Just as we don’t spend every moment thinking about how to track and slow the spread of infectious disease, most public health teams we work with are not experts in spatial data visualization. In the environment of a growing epidemic, maps have a way of spreading quickly, too — making it imperative that they are accurate, informative, and thoughtfully designed. To answer common questions and help organizations make thoughtful design decisions while mapping this and other health crises, we have put together a number of best practices and common pitfalls to avoid.

Putting Science Communication on the Map: How and Why we Built the Earth Observatory Explorer
Presenters: Joshua Stevens, Paul Przyborski, Kevin Ward, NASA Earth Observatory
For more than two decades, NASA's Earth Observatory has been sharing visual science stories with the world. Our archive contains more than 11,000 of these stories that have been tagged with the coordinate locations of the featured imagery. We will discuss how and why we built an interactive map to enable spatial browsing of this database and the challenges and considerations we encountered. We also introduce a new set of base map tiles that are open to the public and available for use in applications today.

Tips for Creating Effective 3D Maps
Presenter: Joe Milbrath, US National Park Service
3D maps can be alluring and especially easy to use for the non-map reader. However, there are key factors that make a 3D map successful and a number of pitfalls that can consume valuable time and still result in an ineffective map. This presentation will walk through the design stages of creating a 3D map and highlight a few key elements to guide you through the process.