Due to some issues I’m running behind just a bit – so enjoy this map from December of 2024.
Tell Us About Yourself
I am a Senior Cartographer at National Geographic Maps, own my own freelance business, Tombolo Maps & Design, and have been making maps professionally for 15 years. My maps have been in more than a dozen books and atlases, six museums, and hundreds of journals, magazines, papers, reports, and as stand-alone products. I’ve also been featured in the GeoHipster Calendar twice before, in 2019 and 2017. I’m a passionate member of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) and volunteer my time to mentoring and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
As for why am I mapping the transboundary Grenadines? I have lived and worked in these islands since 2011, starting with the facilitation of a participatory mapping project focused on important heritage sites, then researching and conducting local ecological knowledge interviews on birds for an avian field guide, and now serving on the Board of Directors for local non-profit, We Are Mayreau, Inc. I also can’t discuss this map without noting that these islands were dramatically impacted by Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. You can see another of my maps visualizing how rare and destructive this hurricane was published in this Global Voices article. If you’re interested in supporting one of the local communities to whom I am most deeply connected, our GoFundMe continues to accept donations towards community rebuilding efforts.
Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know)
This is an abstraction of the islands of the transboundary Grenadines in the Eastern Caribbean (split between the countries of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada). It was inspired by a graphic created by the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism:
My version for the transboundary Grenadines features hollow islands with all-caps for inhabited islands and solid islands with title caps for the uninhabited islets and cays. I used three different shapes to further visualize the size differences between the islands and oriented them to mimic the appearance of the islands themselves. The colors clearly distinguish neighboring island groups (but not the international border which splits a geographic island grouping)—despite the graphic mostly excluding any open ocean along the Grenada Bank—with the yellow, green, red, and blue all pulled directly from the two countries’ flags. Just for fun, I also fashioned a mini reference map within a compass rose.
Tell us about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map.
I created it in Adobe Illustrator with the Avenza MAPublisher plugin by bringing in geospatial data for the islands, then generalized each island into the correct predetermined shape, manually shrunk ocean channels between the islands, and resized the islands while maintaining accurate relative scale. I added labels, applied gaussian blurs to the insides of the inhabited islands, and made lots of minor text adjustments until everything fit together just right.
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