Lost in longitude or confused by contour lines? Want to know all the tips and tricks for getting the most out of your atlas? Curious if paper towns still exist? "Ask a Cartographer" is your opportunity to get the facts straight from the source. Tom Vitacco, Rand McNally Publishing’s Director of GIS is here to answer your burning questions, and geek out over fascinating map lore – one exploration at a time.

This week, we are discussing some more interesting products that we no longer make…

Question: As a cartographer, are there any interesting products that Rand McNally no longer makes that you wish were still being made? (Part two)

Tom’s answer: Thanks again for the question! This week I will continue with Part 2 and talk about a few more products we no longer produce that I wish we still made and go through some of the cartographic challenges we faced creating them. Last week in Part 1, I discussed the fabMAP titles, a map printed on microfiber for tourists, and the Harley Ride Atlas we produced for Harley Davidson at one point in time. For Part 2 this week, I plan to cover the Road Atlas eBook, the Getaway Guides, and the Explore America app, three products which I really liked that we no longer produce.

The Road Atlas eBook

Rand McNally started to create eBooks around 2011 after the initial success of the "Best of the Road" promotion and road rally featured in USA Today. Our cartographic team not only created custom maps for the eBook titles, but also built the eBooks from scratch with editorial and photos provided by the design and marketing teams. A few of the "Best of the Road" eBooks can be seen on the left in the image below. By 2013, we started to work on an eBook for the Road Atlas and the first edition was released for the Apple iBook format in 2014. The eBook was produced for a couple of years before it was discontinued.

Justin Griffin (Sr GIS Analyst) and I were heavily involved with the Road Atlas eBook production, and I believe we helped create an innovative digital version of our flagship product. Most eBooks were just regular books in digital format, basically text with a cover image and occasionally some photos or images were embedded within the book. The "Best of the Road" eBooks contained this type of content and once we learned how to code the eBooks, they were not difficult to produce.

The digital Road Atlas presented a much different challenge for us, however. To start, if you look at a printed atlas, the maps are often rotated so the user must turn the atlas 90 degrees to read the map. We decided this would not work as well in the digital environment, so we broke away from the print atlas layout and designed a new format that presented much of the same information found in the printed road atlas, but in new ways.

In the eBook version, the maps were individually offered as thumbnail images which expanded to full-size maps when the user clicked on the “plus sign” icon floating above the map (shown highlighted with the red box below). The user could browse the map and close it when done, thus returning to the state page in the book. City maps were featured the same way with each individual map shown as a thumbnail that displayed at a larger size.

We included some of the state information found in the top margin of the printed atlas like the state facts, but also added general information not found in the printed version of the atlas (for example the Description section shown above). Since the digital format did not have the same space constraints as print, we added more content. Editorial content related to road trips was included at the end of the eBook as well, similar to the content displayed at the front of the printed road atlas.

There were two features that I felt made this eBook innovative and useful to the user. First, we did not include an index in the digital edition. Custom code was added to the eBook format allowing the user to search for a city within the digital atlas (search menu shown on left below). Once the name was selected, the proper map would pop up and a “floating square” would display, highlighting the general location of the city (shown on right below).

To me, this feature was a key addition to the eBook, because without a search function or index, you basically have a photo gallery of map images with some text. We used the “bingo grid” from the atlas, along with the resolution of the images, to work with an in-house developer who coded the search feature to work based on mathematical formulas and pixel dimensions. It was an advanced technique for eBooks at the time.

Another nice feature was the mileage calculator, which allowed the user to type a city and the distances to many other cities would display, like the mileage chart we still include at the top of the printed road atlas page today (see example on the left below). Finally, an interactive table of contents was included in the eBooks (shown on the right below), so the user could jump between states and other content with ease.

I truly believe the Road Atlas eBook was creative, innovative, and a product I would have liked to see continue. In the end, our customer base might not have been ready for a digital Road Atlas as sales of the printed atlas versus the digital eBook would indicate at the time.

Getaway Guides

Around 2005, the cartographic team here at Rand McNally started to build a new map database from the ground up to replace the existing database used to create the Road Atlas and other state titles. The first two titles produced from the new map database (shown below) were called the Southeast and Midwest Getaway Guides, released in 2006 & 2007, respectively.

These two products were a combination of a road atlas and travel guide but focused on specific regions of the country. They were marketed as a complete guide to travel throughout the Southeastern or Midwestern regions of the country. The guides featured road atlas style maps along with listings of things to see and do in each area, shopping tips, recommendations on lodgings and eateries, local festivals, and more. A true destination guide in a sense.

On the cartographic side, there were a few challenges and interesting aspects to the production. To start, the maps were all the same scale, which is not something we traditionally did with our atlases. The maps in the guides were not set up in alphabetical order like the Road Atlas but were seamless and flowed differently than our regular atlases. The map pages included a Page Locator Map (shown highlighted with the red box below) in the side margin along with a scale and legend.

We chose a 1:1M map scale based on the content of our proprietary map database and it worked well with the page size for the book. Before we could create the maps, however, we had to tag every line, point, polygon, and label in the database with attribution for inclusion or exclusion during the final map export stage. The map below shows an example of multiple states displayed together in a seamless format.

The Destination Guide section shown in the image below included custom maps at various scales created specifically to tie in with the editorial content, so points of interest and other places mentioned in the trip guides were shown on these custom maps. Custom cartography has always been a favorite of mine, so these guides allowed our team to grow and develop new production workflows. The maps also used a different style and color scheme as compared to the regular Road Atlas since we were trying to differentiate these guides from our iconic products.

The Getaway Guides were a true collaborative effort between the GIS, Design and Marketing teams at Rand McNally, allowing for new cartographic development, creative travel editorial, beautiful photography, and experimental layout formats which we had not tried before. However, soon after their release, the company decided to move in a different direction and these two Getaway Guides were the only titles produced.

Explore America App

Finally, the last product I will cover in this blog was an application that I thought was very intriguing and a cool idea when it was released. Rand McNally launched Explore America for the iPhone back in 2010, a free application which provided snippets of unique travel and destination content, maps, photos, videos, a daily quiz, and more.

Users would download the app, then once a day for a full year they would receive a Daily Adventure, which included a description of an intriguing place in North America, a locator map, and up to five photos showing the location and interesting facts about the area. Users could also access exclusive Rand McNally editorial content and share ratings, photos, and content with their preferred social networks. Plus, as part of the adventure, users were invited to take a daily travel quiz, and their answers were scored, timed, and posted to a leaderboard.

The working title for the app during the entire product development cycle was “Take Me Away” but changed to Explore America at the last minute before the official release. Unfortunately, I do not have images from the final app, but I do have screen shots from the final marketing presentation shown in the image above, highlighting some of the cool functions from the app while it was in development.

The cartographic team built small, custom locator maps for each state based on the Pocket Road Atlas, a very small format atlas we used to print. Making legible maps for a small phone screen at a height of 400 pixels was a challenge and a lot of time was spent thinning the map content and cleaning up the maps in Photoshop. A sample set of the maps is shown below.

The free app was very well received upon its release and customers seemed to like getting a random, daily point of interest or place to go delivered to their phone. I found it really cool and liked how the app took what we did well in print – combining maps, trip information and photos - and reformatted the content to display on a phone in a user-friendly package. I am not sure why the app was discontinued to be honest, although I know the developer left for another opportunity later that year and the company was starting to focus on eBooks and other digital content around the same time.

Thanks again for the question and I hope you enjoyed reading about three of the products I wish we still produced. These were fun and sometimes challenging titles to create from a cartographic perspective but were great collaborative efforts by the different teams within the company.

Feel free to submit your map or cartography questions below and check back soon for another installment of "Ask a Cartographer".

Have a question for our cartographer? Email us at printproducts@randmcnally.com with “Ask a Cartographer” in the subject line and your question could be featured next!