What Makes A Map Beautiful, According To A Parks Ranger

This national parks ranger and self-proclaimed cartomaniac shares favorites from his extensive map collection.

Clambering in the back of a van or station wagon and driving with your folks to your nearest national park used to be a summer tradition. Certainly, it was for Matt Holly, who grew up to be a national park’s ranger. “I come from a family that loved visiting national parks,” he says. “There was just something about driving through that park entrance and having the ranger hand you a map. You made it. You’re here now. Let’s have some fun.”

Holly’s obsession with National Park Services (NPS) maps is why he set up NPMaps, a website that serves as a resource for high-resolution downloads of all the national parks maps he can find, as Citylab recently pointed out.

The official map for every national park is designed at Harpers Ferry Center according to the agency’s Unigrid guidelines, which were created by no lesser designer than the legendary Massimo Vignelli. But those aren’t the ones Holly’s really fascinated with: It’s the regional maps created by the local rangers themselves, with highly specific goals unique to their parks.

One feature Holly particularly enjoys on some of the newer maps is the use of a mask to highlight the park area compared to the surrounding terrain. On the Death Valley map, it shows the topography both inside and outside the park, yet the park is still easy to distinguish and really jumps off the page. This is a great example of realistic coloring.

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