Build­ing a little index of some of my maps over time today reminded me of one of my longest pro­jects. Back in the mid 90s, I star­ted design­ing a map (a mov­ing map, ooh­hhh) of the chan­ging bound­ar­ies of Habs­burg ter­rit­orial domains. I star­ted with a series of HTML pages with maps gen­er­ated by Adobe Illus­trator. I then got the bright idea to actu­ally turn it into some­thing inter­act­ive by using Author­ware. Turn­ing it into a flash-based map was the even­tual goal. To be hon­est, it never quite made it into a fully func­tion­ing flash map. The HTML was good, Author­ware even bet­ter, but it has sat unre­fined as I got dis­trac­ted by other things.

Today when I was brow­ing about I came across Maps of War. They are fea­tur­ing a map called ‘Imper­ial — His­tory’ which is a beau­ti­ful work. There are a num­ber of other won­der­ful maps, all of which are the mov­ing map of my mach­in­a­tions. A small timeline scrolls across the bot­tom of the screen as the large, col­our­ful map is panned about to show ‘who has con­trolled the Middle East’ from 3000 BCE to today. It is won­der­fully executed, even let­ting you jump from date to date on the timeline. The changes in imper­ial ter­rit­or­ies are gradual and smooth. Bril­liant execution.