I’m heading to Madison, Wisconsin this week for the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS)’s annual meeting, which kicks off tomorrow. The first day of the conference offers a series of extended sessions that will make up “Practical Cartography Day.” I’ll be giving a presentation on how to use open-source tools like TileMill, Carto, and Mapnik to achieve beautiful cartography for the web and mobile devices.

Attractive, effective design is a driving goal behind all of our cartography, and my presentation will detail specific techniques we use with our free and open-source cartography toolset. I’ll also be talking about things to keep in mind when designing maps for the web and how to leverage interactive elements to tell deeper stories. I’ll include specific case studies of approaches we’ve taken to rapidly design and deploy highly custom and highly interactive maps on the web and iPad, such as the Census map we made with NPR and our maps of the famine in the Horn of Africa.

If you’re going to be at the conference, sit in on my presentation “Advanced Interactive Cartography for the Web” at 2:00 pm on Wednesday or find me some other time during the conference to talk about fast, beautiful maps for the web and mobiles. This will be the first NACIS conference for both me and Development Seed, and I look forward to meeting plenty of new people and learning the latest from the rest of the cartographic world.