Artistically redrawing New Zealand’s maps
If you’re planning a road trip around New Zealand this summer, Andrew Douglas-Clifford could be your perfect navigator.
The 24-year-old Christchurch man has pored over New Zealand’s transport network for years to create his unique line of maps, some of which have proved hugely popular as works of art.
His most popular was published in early-2016, a London Underground-style map of New Zealand’s state highways. He had since sold thousands.
His latest, published on Sunday, is captioned ‘‘Nobody lives here’’. The green and white map shows in stark detail the 78.21 per cent of New Zealand that is uninhabited.
‘‘I did a bachelor of science in geography at university, which is quite map focused, and that got me interested in the cartography side,’’ Douglas-Clifford said.
‘‘It just clicked for me and I started working on it in my own time, producing maps and suddenly some of the maps got popular and it was something that people wanted so I was encouraged to do it more.’’
He recently finished his masters of geographic information sciences, his chosen topic – crowd sourcing passenger satisfaction information on busses. But it was a postgraduate paper on cartography that hooked DouglasClifford’s interest. Out of a class of 25, he shone through.
‘‘There were varying degrees of enthusiasm for it and I suppose I was the most enthusiastic,’’ he said.
The key to a good map, he said, was simplicity and an understanding of the data you were presenting.
‘‘A badly done map doesn’t really pay any attention to how crowded it might be, or whether it’s not using readable colours.
‘‘It’s about taking a considered approach to how the data is going to look, and [its] context. A lot of data just isn’t presented interestingly and cleanly.’’
In June, Douglas-Clifford made seven maps in seven days. He said it was ‘‘fairly intense’’.
‘‘I sort of underestimated how much work it would be, but it was definitely rewarding and got the ideas flowing under pressure.’’
Cartography was hardly a celebrity-heavy field, and DouglasClifford said he found media attention ‘‘weird’’.
The bonus was knowing his maps were on people’s walls across the world. A lot of sales came from the UK, which he put down to the interest in his London-style map of New Zealand.
‘‘Selling maps isn’t the only thing I do, I also do commission work and contract work for companies that need a bit of mapping work done.’’
He hoped to ‘‘keep chugging’’ with maps and see where the practice takes him.
"There were varying degrees of enthusiasm for [cartography] and I suppose I was the most enthusiastic." Andrew Douglas-Clifford