urhere is all about maps
historic maps
modern maps
who made them
why they made them
what makes them special
coming at you from two expert cartographers who love to chat about maps
Gretchen Peterson
Owner at PetersonGIS, Author
Gretchen Peterson is the founder and principal of PetersonGIS. Her work focuses on cartographic innovation; enterprise-level, global vector tile basemaps; and geographic data analysis and visualization for natural resources management issues. Consulting since 2003, she has helped over 30 clients, some for more than a decade, from Fortune 500 companies to small non-profits to local, regional, and federal government organizations to better the world and visualize it meaningfully. For clients like Microsoft, Wikimedia Foundation, Facebook, and Maxar she creates world-scale zoomable maps, for clients like Colorado State University, the Hood Canal Coordinating Council, and Save the Poudre she makes maps that help conserve our natural resources. She is also the author of City Maps, Cartographer's Toolkit, GIS Cartography 3rd Edition, and co-author of QGIS Map Design 2nd edition. Gretchen's portfolio is here and her books are here.
Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel
Cartographer, Educator, Community Advocate
Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel is a detail-oriented cartographer, analyst and designer that loves thinking about how to create and design products and utilize spatial data to tell visual stories in the best way possible. She also cares a lot about cartographic and spatial education, and has spent a lot of the past decade giving talks and hosting workshops, because she believes everyone can become a better analyst, designer, and storyteller - even if they never have been in the spatial industry.
Vanessa is a Senior Map Designer at Mapbox by day, but in her free time she also is a Director at Large for the North American Cartographic Information Society, an adjunct professor at George Washington University, the founder of #creativeCarto, and of course, one half of URhere. She also does non-mappy things: you can find her lifting weights, running, or enjoying the outdoors when not doing the above.
Chat with her on twitter @run_for_funner. Vanessa's portfolio is here.
