Andrew Tyrrell

How far can I get using AI in cartography? I drove Canada's Icefields Parkway last month, and want to make a poster map of it. Can AI help, and do it well? I started on my phone, then realised it needed more than that and moved to the desktop. AI-first: Claude, a bit of ChatGPT. A thread... 🧵🗺️

#MapsInTheWild at the Palm Springs Convention Centre

I’m grateful to @nacis.bsky.social for many things, but I’m currently most grateful for #NACIS2026 serendipitously causing me to become a #Brewers fan…

Doing a bit of digital remote sensing en route to #IMGIS. Hi Esri!

Submissions for Volume 8 of the @nacis.bsky.social Atlas of Design are now open! Printed or digital, 2D or 3D, the traditional and the unconventional – we’re interested in maps about anything, from anywhere, from anyone. Visit atlasofdesign.org for info and the link to submit your map

Do you have any idea how it feels to walk into a room full of people you've looked up to your whole professional life and be seen not just as a colleague but as a friend? #nacis2026

Some absolutely stunning 3D maps from Maddy at NACIS today. Ooh. Aah. Nice. #NACIS2026

Daniel P. Huffman (@pinakographos.bsky.social) & Andrew Tyrrell (@southarrowmaps.co.nz): New Methods for Generating Vector Hachures github.com/pinakographo... #NACIS2026

This is so fun to play around with!!! Amazing work from @cartoguophy.bsky.social

What an excellent visualization tool. I would have loved to have had this available when I used to teach cartography. hypertidy.github.io/playproj/

See you at #nacis2026 next week in Milwaukee! All volumes of the Atlas of Design are in stock and we will have samples at the conference. Submissions for Volume 8 will open very soon!

Who’s coming to @nacis.bsky.social next week? 🙋‍♂️

Seen at a cartography conference. To the lay reader this comparison might seem legit. Why would you question it? To most in the audience the words What. The. Actual. F&£€. were voiced. See if you can spot the egregious error.

New on the blog: "GenAI for the Static Cartographer," in which I express my concerns about AI but then give ideas on how to use it, anyway. Features results both impressive and mediocre. somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2026/09/08/g...

Honestly, I just don’t really have the time, creativity, or enthusiasm to make something new, which I’m a bit disappointed about. But I’ve been going through my projects from the past two years, and I’m very proud of the maps I’ve made! I think I’ll submit a few of them for this year’s gallery.

Results have just been posted for the Alliance of Freelance Cartographers 2026 Annual Survey! www.freelancemaps.org/annual-surve... Please share this with freelance mappers in your orbit. This information helps empower our community. #freelance #maps #cartography

We’ve been having the most incredible thunderstorm in Vancouver for at least the last three hours, maybe four. It’s still going. I went down to the beach to watch the show.

I’ve got 13 days in which to create and submit a map for the #NACIS2026 Map Gallery before the August 31st deadline. Any requests?

#MapsInTheWild at the Grasshopper Pub, Sunshine Coast, BC. This is my first visit to the Sunshine Coast and it definitely won’t be my last. What a wonderful part of the province/country/world!

18 years ago, in my first carto class, my instructor said that computers could do map labeling, but they were bad at it and would likely be for a long time. This advice has held true longer than I anticipated.

Labelling is a system: move one and five others shift too. Claude handles that knock-on tirelessly, but plenty of times I'd be faster by hand. But the main thing I learned from this is that labelling is a part of mapmaking that I love. Doing it through an AI was achievable, but quietly joyless.

I asked Claude to label the main highways with their official shields, and it told me, confidently, that it could create SVGs "from the official specs". Pushed on the source of those specs, it admitted it was making them up from memory. They were all crap. So I downloaded the real SVGs myself...

I will never not be a fan of 3D maps in visitor centres. Here’s the one in the Glacier Public Service Center in Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest

I figured out a useful generalization hack. I had a high-res railroad network, including all individual tracks. I wanted to thin this down to single lines for my map. I've used some GIS tools for this in the past, and/or manually selected segments. But this time I used some network analaysis tools.