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How did I make that?

The Data Visualisation Team at Ordnance Survey often create bespoke maps to tell a story or celebrate an event. They use new tools and different pieces of software to make them to showcase what we can do with our data and how it can be visualised in different ways. They often get asked ‘How did you make that?’, so they have created a number of tutorials which do just that.

Extract of the OS Apollo 11 map showing the lunar landing site and surrounding features. The map includes detailed cartographic representation of the Moon’s surface, with labeled craters, landing coordinates, and contour lines illustrating terrain

Apollo 11 Landing

Extract of the OS North York Moors 70-year anniversary joy plot map. The map features a stylized visualization using joy plots to represent elevation profiles across the North York Moors, with layered curves creating a colorful, artistic depiction of the landscape

North York Moors National Park - 70 years

Map extract celebrating 70 years of Snowdonia National Park. The map highlights the park’s boundaries and key geographic features, using detailed cartographic styling to showcase the landscape and commemorate the anniversary

70 years of Snowdonia National Park

Extract of a poster showcasing Great Britain’s national parks using detailed terrain maps created with OS Terrain 5 data. Each park is represented with high-resolution shaded relief, highlighting the varied landscapes across the country

Great Britain's National Parks

Extract from an OS poster showcasing Great Britain’s islands larger than 5 km². The map highlights the geographic shapes and locations of these islands with detailed cartographic styling

Great Britain's Islands

Extract from an OS poster showing Great Britain’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) and National Scenic Areas. The map highlights the boundaries of these protected landscapes with detailed cartographic styling

Great Britain's AONB's and National Scenic Areas

Extract from an OS map showing the locations of famous shipwrecks around the Pembrokeshire coastline. The map includes detailed coastal features with markers indicating shipwreck sites, accompanied by labels naming notable wrecks

Famous shipwrecks of Pembrokeshire

Map extract showing a hexbin bivariate visualization of trig pillar density against elevation. Each hexagon represents a geographic area, with color intensity and shading indicating the relationship between pillar density and height, illustrating spatial patterns across the region

Trig pillars today

Extract from a poster showing Britain’s 40 most complex motorway junctions. The map highlights the locations of these junctions across the country, with detailed cartographic styling and labels identifying each junction

Britain's top 40 most complex motorway junctions

Please click on the data visualisation you would like to learn how to recreate to find out how we made it.

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