In our series “Maps and mappers of the 2016 calendar” we will present throughout 2016 the mapmakers who submitted their creations for inclusion in the 2016 GeoHipster calendar.
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Katie Kowalsky
Q: Tell us about yourself.
A: 
I’m Katie, a cartographer, hot sauce enthusiast, and recent San Francisco transplant. I work at Mapzen where I focus on building tutorials, writing documentation, and supporting our users through improving the usability of our products. This means in a given week I can be running user research testing, answering support questions or talking at a lot of events.
Q: 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).
A: I come from a family of artists and since I was little, art museums always feel like home to me. Some of my favorite pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum (my hometown!) are by Roy Lichtenstein, including Crying Girl and Water Lily Pond Reflections. These two pieces have always been examples of his great use of primary colors and Ben-day dots. This color and texture palette has always stayed in the back of my mind. When I started learning about Tilemill and basemap design, I was inspired by how creative and unique the designers from Stamen and Mapbox were. While working at the Cartography Lab at UW-Madison, I had a chance to rebuild curriculum teaching basemap design and was inspired by my love of pop art to bring that into a basemap design to use as an example for the lab tutorial.
Q: Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.
A: This was built entirely in Mapbox Studio (now known as Classic), using Mapbox-Streets and their vector terrain source for the data. I built this interactive basemap (view it here) from zoom 1 to 22 using the glorious CartoCSS interface!
