Nat Case – Designer

Cartography and information graphics, mostly for non-fiction and historical fiction. Map, photo and illustration research, and cleanup. I have worked in publishing since 1991, mapping and also designing publications and managing printing.

Clients have included university presses and trade publishers, individual scholars and writers, and non-profits and companies large and small. I spent 22 years as head of production (head cartographer) for Hedberg Maps, Inc., a map publishing company, with more than 1000 projects under my belt there.

I especially love graphically challenging puzzles and helping clients clarify and resolve them, and getting to sink my teeth into graphic research on a topic I haven't tackled before. I have a particular affinity for imitating late 19th and early 20th century map styles, but most of my work is in a contemporary style. I have developed good toolsets for other historically evocative styles (I am often frustrated by anachronistic use of historical styles: they didn't have copperplate engraving in the Viking era!), notably wodcut and pen-and-ink manuscript styles.

I can do good work on fictional (i.e. fantasy) geographies, but I tend to do best when detailed world-building about the landscape has already been done by the author. Think about the landscape's geomorphology: how did the mountains get there? is this island part of a volcanic chain? how did this watershed develop? etc.

I largely work in Adobe Illustrator, using QGIS and MaPublisher to edit and process geodata. I use Adobe InDesign for layout. Deliverables can be in PDF, EPS, Illustrator, or a variety of other formats—I have a client I designed artwork in CAD to be cut out of big sheets of steel, and another who printed my map on a football-field-sized piece of billboard vinyl and laid it on the pedestrian plaza of Rockefeller Center...

Please note, I do not use AI in generation of my maps or writing, but I do use a machine-learning-based program, Eduard, to generate shaded relief imagery from elevation data.

I am happy to talk through projects in some detail with clients; I want to get the project clearly laid out before committing to it, and a conversation is usually the best way to do this.