Profiling Dave Imus, Cartographer

Author: Caitlin Dempsey • 8/10/08 • Categorized as Cartography

The Eugene Register-Guard profiles an Oregonian cartographer by the name of Dave Imus. Imus has produced maps of Oregon and local jurisdictions in Oregon and won a “Best of Show” award from the American Congress on Surveying & Mapping. The article has some great quotes from Imus and others that were interviewed relating to cartography. Imus holds up the Swiss in terms of the quality of their mapmaking:

“The Swiss, they are the superlatives when it comes to maps,” says Imus, spreading out a map of Switzerland on a dining room table. “The topography. The detail. You see it all. Americans don’t have great map-making tradition. Some of our maps look like spaghetti.”

All of Imus’ maps are manually created using overlays in Adobe Illustrator (no auto-labeling for this cartographer). His maps are made up of over 256 layers in Illustrator and every last detail is attended to:

“I started doing maps in a very insecure period of my life and I didn’t want to make any mistakes,” he says. “So my motive to be accurate was fear of rejection, I suppose.”

Tom Patterson, a senior cartographer for the National Park Service and a former president of the National Cartographic Information Society praised Imus’ work saying:

“Map making involves switching back and forth as scientist and artist,” says Patterson. “On one level, you have all this research, the details, the left-brain activity; on another level, you have this artistic graphics, making it work visually. Sometimes it’s hard to switch between the two, but he does it well.”