You probably landed on this page from an old Google search result pointing to our original website. On our new website we moved information about our freelance cartography work to the Custom Maps page. But since the old URL persists, it seems sensible we should put a page here that points you in the right direction. 

Not counting notebook doodles, imaginary railroad networks, and putting yellow lines on the trails I've hiked, and architectural site plans, I have been making custom maps for a living since 1992. In the late 1980s I joined an ongoing Trail Center project to map all the parks in the San Francisco Peninsula and South Bay (Peninsula Parklands map), then two detailed trail maps of the Southern and Central Peninsula (out of print). As I lived in San Francisco, I was the liaison to cartographer Kris Bergstrom, and learned a lot from discussing our and other projects; she designed the classic SF MUNI transit map and Jerry Olmsted's four Rambler's Guides, plus a variety of commercial work. She was an expert at working in color, even as publishing shifted from mylar film and camera settings to computer graphics. 
 
I got two early freelance projects from Wilderness Press in Berkeley in the early 1990s – infill maps for new editions of Peninsula Trails and Stairway Walks in San Francisco, and off I went. Ulysses Press in Berkeley and Moon Handbooks in Emeryville were expanding their tourist guidebooks, and needed help digitizing old maps; they discovered they could add a map per hike, or neighborhood, over time. Eventually that market settled out, by which point I was doing a steady stream of work for Wilderness Press, and The Mountaineers Books, plus UC Press and others.

Someday I'll turn these memories into a proper blogpost, but meanwhile click on over to our Custom Maps page and find out how we can help with YOUR project.

– Ben Pease