Imus spent hours picking the levels of colors and shading. For instance, the large population centers pop with a bright yellow, but on the outskirts of big cities, the yellow becomes more diluted until it fades out completely.
Instead of just coloring mountain ranges the standard brown, Imus used more subtle shading to mark higher versus lower elevations.
Imus also made a lot of editorial choices. He omitted some Chicago suburbs, so he could include the Chicago Cub’s Wrigley Field.
Imus explained, “If you are looking at a map of Egypt and it had a bunch of towns on it, but didn’t include the pyramids, wouldn’t you say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t the pyramids have told us something about Egypt?”
It was no small feat for Imus to make this map.
“I worked on it seven days a week, 10 or 12 hours pretty much every day for two years,” he said.
Imus’ map won top honors at last year’s Cartography and Geographic Information Society Competition.
