The other day I mentioned that the only other job I can imagine myself happily doing is cartography. You see, I love maps. I love looking at atlases. <\/p>\n
When I first got a real job after uni, I worked for Readers Digest Australia in their books department as a book designer. The books we made were BIG books. With a whole team of people working on them, they would usually take at least a year to make.<\/p>\n
Two of the books that I worked on were map books. If you’re in Australia, and are familiar with Readers Digest books, you may know of “Book of the Road” and “Australia’s Most Scenic Drives”. “Book of the Road” was a huge map book that had an very innovative layout meaning that the maps all flowed on, one from the other, without having to properly turn the page. Its very difficult to explain how it works, but it was quite incredible.<\/p>\n
The maps were supplied to us by a mapping company. I made it my job to check the maps against one another. While the maps flowed continuously from left to right, they had the usual markers at the top and bottom, telling you which map it joined onto.<\/p>\n
Now, as you can imagine with maps, the roads went off the top and bottom, continuing on the next map. There was a slight overlap at the top and bottom of each map, with the next map, so that you could more easily re-orient yourself, on arriving on the new page.<\/p>\n
I found that sometimes a road would go off one map and come back on the next map at a different level of importance. ie on one map it was a minor road, and on the next map it suddenly changed to being a secondary road. There were towns that from map to map were different, with their relative sizes indicating different populations. Obviously, these were mistakes that needed to be fixed. So I made it my job to find them all. We then sent the discrepancies back to the mapping company so they could correct the mistakes. (I don’t think they counted on someone like me checking as thoroughly as I did!)<\/p>\n
I also often had to smooth the text of the road names along the roads so that it fitted better with the curve of the road, and move town names around (still making sure they were suitably attached to their relevant location) so that they would fit better.<\/p>\n
I gained a really good appreciation of how Australia fits together. I learned where all sorts of places were. I mentally noted funny place names. Did you know there is a small town just north of Sydney called “the letter A”? We’ve even been there!<\/p>\n
I had so much fun – map books are great to work on. So if I ever had to retrain for a new career, I’d love to be a cartographer. But as I love what I do now so much, I can’t see that it will ever actually happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day I mentioned that the only other job I can imagine myself happily doing is cartography. You see, I love maps. I love looking at atlases. <\/p>\n
When I first got a real job after uni, I worked for Readers Digest Australia in their books department as a book designer. The books we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-books","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":806,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions\/806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vettycreations.com.au\/white-threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}