#30DayMapChallenge 2022

Creating 30 themed maps is a difficult task in a short period of time! Here are my entries for this year:

I started off the challenge this year with something quite simple. The style of this map is inspired by maps by Kate Berg from previous years.

I love baked goods so this will be very useful the next time I visit the U.S.A!

Glendalough is a beautiful place to go for a hike - there are a handful of trails which circle the upper and lower lakes.

These hiking trails are within one of Ireland's few national parks - Wicklow Mountains National Park!

I wanted to make at least one map this year with a retro 80's style. I love how the neon effect turned out in this one!

Toulouse is well known for its gardens, parks, and most importantly, trees! Some trees in the city are as old as the 18th Century.

To fit the green theme of the day, I decided to plot Toulouse's 22,000 trees against a hexagon tesselation.

Find out more about the cities trees  here .

Ukraine has, of course, been in the news for all of the worst reasons this year. I took the Ukraine theme for day 5 as an opportunity to show off some of the natural beauty of the country's capital, Kyiv.

I love travelling by train where possible - it's a fantastic way to reduce your carbon footprint! One thing I'd love to do in the future is to experience the bullet train, or Shinkansen, in Japan.

The shinkansen is known for travelling at speeds up to 320 km/h, connecting the country's largest cities.

OpenStreetMap is a fantastic resource for the #30DayMapChallenge and beyond. I use OpenStreetMap data in many of my maps, so I wanted to add a twist to the OpenStreetMap theme.

Using a couple of different tools, my aim with this map was to recreate the Mona Lisa with a map centred on its location in the Louvre.

I saw some fantastic interpretations of the Space theme shared to Twitter by other creators. Working in GIS, space is something that comes to mind everyday. For this map, I decided to look at the space in between cities in Europe. It's interesting to see that cities in the UK tend to be closer together than those in other parts of Europe!

I just couldn't bring myself to make a purposely bad map for the challenge - 'bad' means different things depending on your skill level and personal style. I'd hate to discourage someone who's just starting with GIS or cartography!

Instead, this map shows Michael Jackson's Bad tour locations across the world.

Supermacs vs McDonalds is a famous rivalry in Ireland. In 2019,  McDonalds lost its ability to trademark the term 'Big Mac' in Ireland  and the rest of Europe due to a push from Supermacs.

This map shows the domination of Supermacs in Ireland, particularly outside of Leinster!

Scale is one of the key considerations to be made in GIS. Scale can impact on how are maps look, how people can use them, and can also impact our data.

This map shows three levels of detail available in Natural Earth datasets.

Hexagons are a great way to bin ans symbolise point data. For this map, I generated a hexagon tesselation and joined it with open data on Dublin city's street lights.

This map took far longer than any other map I completed as part of the #30DayMapChallenge this year, but I think it's worth it! I designed this with the ambition of placing it on my Etsy store. Definitely printing a copy for my office!

It can be hard to think of the world as a globe when you're constantly looking at flat maps. I often forget what cities are on the same latitude as me - this map tries to highlight what cities are on similar latitudes.

I prepared the data for this map using Python (specifically ArcPy!) by rounding latitudes of major cities, placing the cities on nearby lines of latitude, calculating a slight rotation for the angle of the lines in this projection, and pick which cities would fit on the final map.

The full Kontur population dataset is too large for my computer to manage! So instead of looking at the entire dataset, I downloaded a subset to see what I could do with it!

I absolutely love how this map turned out, down to the colours and the fonts I used.

A key part of Irish culture is the pint. Whether it's Guinness or another inferior pint, you need to get to a pub to get your fix.

I was surprised to find out how much of the country doesn't have access to a pint closeby.

This map shows areas of Ireland where the number of pubs is 0.

I am proud to be the drummer for the fabulous TBL8 Brass. This theme was a great opportunity to make a map related to the band. The map shows everywhere we've travelled and performed as a band.

Check out a video of us playing in  Whelan's, Dublin  below! (I'm in the back, see if you can spot me!)

This map had to be a quick one since it was done last minute! Because the theme dictated minimal colours, I went with a minimal theme overall.

I chose to highlight Abbey Road, made famous by The Beatles' album, in some colours I grabbed from the album cover!

Greece is one of my favourite places I've travelled. Greece has over 1,200 islands, varying in size and population. This map shows off some of Greece's most famous islands in a Greek colour palette. (There's some photos of my island hopping adventures below too!)

As a musician, I often think about where the instruments I play come from. This map shows the origin of a handful of European instruments in an infographic style.

Data for this map is sourced from  Mental Floss  - it's a really interesting article so check it out!

Howth is one of the most picturesque areas of Dublin and is famous for it's cliff walks. I went with a minimal approach for the 3D theme, showing contours of the beautiful peninsula!

Day 29's map was a brilliant learning exercise for me - I'm starting to get a bit more comfortable with rasters with every year of the #30DayMapChallenge.

I was really excited to complete this map, not only because it closed of 2022's challenge, but also because I got to revisit one of my maps from the 2019 challenge. This one is a remix of my Glasnevin map using some of the colours and fonts I'm into at the moment!

There were so many amazing submissions to the #30DayMapChallenge this year! It's really hard to pick out only a few, so a massive shoutout to everyone who took part this year, whether with one map or thirty! Here are some of my absolute favourites (in no particular order of course)!