Full time jobs for cartographers?

[Redrobes]

My work varies a lot but I am coding a mapping job at present and I have done several in the past. I have done car dashboard GPS systems and a few similar to that but on the whole most of my work is nothing to do with maps. There is the OS as Mouse says which does employ quite a few people - no doubt each country has their own agency for doing the national mapping. There are a couple of aerial photography outfits one which is not very far from me. A lot of their work is translating the aerial info into 3D models like Saab etc. Another business which were hiring recently was the oceanographic and hydrology people making maps for shipping and no doubt submarines and whatever else they do - it sounded tempting but the pay wasn't very good on it tho and they were heavily into Microsoft products to do the job and used a lot of buzzword bingo to sell the role which is always a bad sign.

There are lots of design houses that have to make maps of land use, shopping centres etc but they are usually quite architectural in style. Building plans for fire escapes and numerous other dry CAD type maps. There are no shortage of maps being made and someone is being paid to do them but I dont think that barely any of them are fantasy or have a lot of artistic merit to them.

I did a small amount of work in the games industry and I dont think they use many off the shelf apps to make the maps within a game. Often they use a 3D game engine which incorporates the terrain editor, other times like the game I was tangentially involved in, they wrote their own game level designer for the game. The bar for getting into games is quite high and the prospect of using one of the apps we see here a lot is slim. Robbie has done some game engine maps on this site and they are the only ones where I think its close to the requirements for games companies. You can get some free game engines now tho and you can play with the editors within them to give them a go. Its going to be nothing like CC3 tho.

[ThomasR]

Actually, I was about to talk about Steffen's job. Maxime Plasse does something pretty similar for a french RPG company if I'm not mistaken (Les XII Singes).

@ SteffenBrand : You landed the dream job

[DanielHasenbos]

Oh what a lovely dream that would be

I've never seen anything other than OS jobs, and that's not fantasy cartography. Its also very sexist. Or at least, when I was fresh out of college with an 'HND in Land Use' under my belt. It was most definitely a male dominated occupation. (We're talking about the way things were back in the sexist 80s, when women were never taken at all seriously if they wanted to do something other with their lives than become a house-bound baby machine). Only the boys in my college group ever got to be 'proper' cartographers - even though I had 5 distinctions and the best of the rest of them had only 3. I never even got an interview, thanks to the fact that I was female.

I ended up doing all the photocopying and making all the coffee for a nameless Planning and Estates team at a certain County Hall in the south east of the country. Bored to hell, I was. I certainly never drew any maps the entire year I was there, even though my official title was 'Mapping Assistant'.

'Coffee Maid, and Chief Gofer', more like!

That really sucks, Sue! Sometimes it really stuns me how sexist people were in the past. It's a lot better today, though you still hear about men making more money, and getting better jobs. At least it's improving.

So the only answer I can give to the OP is check Artstation. They might have work where you draw maps for video games and such. Or who knows what else you can find there. The only reason I haven't looked intensely enough is because I am using CC3+ and it is not known in the gaming world as being a program that most companies want to pay for considering they cannot have exclusive rights to all of the artwork produced in it.

That's actually a good one Tony! Didn't think of that one!

I actually have exactly that job. I work full time 40h with regular salary for Europes largest RPG-P&P-Company, managing Cartographers who are freelancers and doing as much cartography as I can myself. But yeah, you are not wrong - the job was never offered, but I suggested it to them after my GF said I should. That was about 2 years ago. =)

What I want to say is this: Suggest the job to the company. Take the initiative, just apply. It can happen, but it is rare.

I remember you telling me something like that when I started out, also about two years ago. Good advice, then and now. Probably a good idea to try and find some publishers nearby. I'll look into that! ;D

Yeah, it's something I've often wondered myself Dan. I certainly think it's possible to make a full time living from it, but I think even at the very top, it's going to be pretty much freelance work, but I don't know for sure. There's some people on here like GamePrinter who run their own RPG publishing units, and would make the maps to accompany that, but I'm pretty sure that involves writing the lot of modules too. Plus, I know he still takes freelance pieces, such as those Call of Duty maps he published a while back.

It certainly would be interesting to hear from some of the people on the guild who have found some success in that regard. Francesca Baerald seems to be doing fairly well, but equally she branches out into plenty of illustration pieces as well. Max I haven't seen too much on here recently, but it seemed he was solely a cartographer at some point.

I think Steffen's advice is useful and probably the best you're going to get.

*Also, Sue, sorry to hear of some of those things. It's such a shame how ignorant the world can be sometimes.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the ones you named all do this full time. Still, they're self-employed. Not that I necessarily don't want to be self-employed, just seeing what other ways there are in our business. I'm actually starting to explore other means of expanding my business, as your are well aware of! ;P

My work varies a lot but I am coding a mapping job at present and I have done several in the past. I have done car dashboard GPS systems and a few similar to that but on the whole most of my work is nothing to do with maps. There is the OS as Mouse says which does employ quite a few people - no doubt each country has their own agency for doing the national mapping. There are a couple of aerial photography outfits one which is not very far from me. A lot of their work is translating the aerial info into 3D models like Saab etc. Another business which were hiring recently was the oceanographic and hydrology people making maps for shipping and no doubt submarines and whatever else they do - it sounded tempting but the pay wasn't very good on it tho and they were heavily into Microsoft products to do the job and used a lot of buzzword bingo to sell the role which is always a bad sign.

There are lots of design houses that have to make maps of land use, shopping centres etc but they are usually quite architectural in style. Building plans for fire escapes and numerous other dry CAD type maps. There are no shortage of maps being made and someone is being paid to do them but I dont think that barely any of them are fantasy or have a lot of artistic merit to them.

I did a small amount of work in the games industry and I dont think they use many off the shelf apps to make the maps within a game. Often they use a 3D game engine which incorporates the terrain editor, other times like the game I was tangentially involved in, they wrote their own game level designer for the game. The bar for getting into games is quite high and the prospect of using one of the apps we see here a lot is slim. Robbie has done some game engine maps on this site and they are the only ones where I think its close to the requirements for games companies. You can get some free game engines now tho and you can play with the editors within them to give them a go. Its going to be nothing like CC3 tho.

Thanks RedRobes. I'm afraid the field that you described isn't quite what I'm looking for. I make decent fantasy maps, but have no knowledge of actual cartography.

Actually, I was about to talk about Steffen's job. Maxime Plasse does something pretty similar for a french RPG company if I'm not mistaken (Les XII Singes).

Yes, I thought so too. Those would probably be closest to what I'm looking for.


So thanks for all the thoughts and ideas everyone! I actually came across a publisher that was looking for an Art Director some time ago. Most of the job involved contracts, recruiting artists, deciding deadlines, budget handling and make all those things work together. I'm a terrible organizer, and something like that seems to be well beyond my skills. It would bring me more stress than it would be worth. I was hoping to find out if there are in-between jobs. I know that there's always going to be other things involved, and that's not even a bad thing.

[ThomasR]

Geopolitcal newspaper or magazines often use maps in their articles. In France we even have a magazine called Carto that focuses on maps, to talk about geopolitical issues most of the time but also on mapping as itself. I also know of a group of geographs who do maps for such paper, you can check the twitter accounts if you like :
@CartoMag
@LegendesCarto

Unfortunately, here again, it's "pencil-for-hire" (or "GIS-for-hire") work.

[J.Edward]

Even many of the maps made for National Geographic and other publications are often done by third parties, be they freelancers or full companies.
Sadly, or not [depending on your point of view], we are moving more and more into what they are calling the 'Gig' economy.
And that is going to become very cut-throat very quickly.

Freelancing is a hard life. I don't really recommend it to anyone.
I would love to have a job like Steffen's.
The financial security would be nice.

I spread my work across several fronts, not just mapping.
I think you sort of need that to get through.
There are a lot of mapping jobs, but there are more mappers competing for those jobs than there are jobs.

[Lukc]

Then there are some people who've managed to turn mapping into full-time gigs through Patreon - an example is Dyson Logos (http://www.dysonlogos.com/). It's a hard road to get there, tho'!