Please Don’t Be “The Map Guy”

It never ceases to amaze me how many GIS professionals feel the need to brand themselves “The Map Guy”. If you could collect a business card from everyone at a GIS conference you would find maybe a quarter of them with “The Map Guy!” printed below their name. It’s not a bad tag line for someone who makes maps but for goodness sake, it’s been done.

Of course it does no good to complain about something unless you can come up with an alternative. Here are a few business card ready tags you can use to show yourself to be a unique member of the GIS community:

• The Ace of Maps
• The Map Ninja
• The CartoWarrior
• The GeoGiant
• Not To Scale
• The Carto Kid
• The Human Projection
• Thematic and Proud
• The Mad Mapper
• CartoManiac
• And my favorite – The Original Geographer

There, see? Now there are no more excuses for following the crowd. Now go out and be someone different, and no, “The Map Man” Doesn’t count.