Dear Map-Enthusiast,

We are very pleased to announce the launch of indiemapper.io. Indiemapper is a project that is very near and dear to our hearts. When we were starting as a company or even before that at the University of Wisconsin, we constantly talking about the tools available to us as cartographers. Talking might be putting it lightly... we were complaining.

The same things were coming up time and time again. Why is it so hard to make a simple map from digital data? Why did we need to keep PC's around when all of our design work was done on Macs? Why was all the current software so expensive when we were only using 10% of its total functionality?

At the same time, we were building some great online tools built for cartography. Ben was building TypeBrewer to help map-makers understand and make better choices with typography. Mark had built ColorBrewer a few years earlier when he was back at Penn State. Dave was working on bringing usable UI controls to temporal and geographic visualization in BallotBank. These programs were built on expert content, usability and accessibility.  Why weren't web-based tools like this available within a the map-making environment?

Flash forward to the spring of 2008. Indiemapper began as a proof-of-concept built by Andy and Zach Johnson during their free time. They wanted to see just how much of the cartographic capabilities of GIS could be moved online using Flash. As it turns out, quite a lot. Originally, we thought that this would be a great code repository from which we could draw ideas and code to build into maps we were making for clients. Then it all came together. Indiemapper was so close! Andy's original work proved it could be done. We could finally build the application that we ourselves had been wanting for all these years!

Indiemapper is still in development and there's a lot we're still learning about the final product. We're re-coding that original prototype from the ground up to make it robust enough for professional cartographers in a production environment. We've redesigned the UI and built in expert choices (colors from ColorBrewer, type from TypeBrewer, data classification, etc) to make it easy for novice map-makers to produce great looking maps quickly.

We know that there are lots of people like us who are frustrated by the current available tools because of their price or their functionality. We're confident indiemapper is for you and will find a place in your mapping workflow.

Looking forward to making maps with you,

Axis Maps LLC