About

Datum & Ink is a two-sided map studio in Victoria, British Columbia.

Ink is the side you are on — cartography as objects worth keeping. Limited plates, printed and framed to order.

Datum is the working side — GIS services, spatial analysis and operational cartography for organizations that need raw geodata turned into decisions.

How the maps are made

The relief and basin plates begin as public elevation and hydrology data — chiefly HydroSHEDS — read at its native resolution and rendered by a pipeline built for this and nothing else. Nothing is traced, smoothed by hand, or invented. The ridgelines are where the ridgelines are, and the rivers run where the water actually runs.

What the studio adds is the reading of it: which projection, which scale, how light falls across the terrain, and where the frame closes. A map is an argument about what matters in a place. These ones are made carefully.

The three styles

Elevation Relief — monochrome shaded relief. Landform only: ridge, valley, and the shape of the ground.
Rivers & Basins — drainage networks and their watersheds, colour-coded on black.
Chroma RGB — chromatic terrain studies, where elevation is read as colour rather than shadow.

Printing

Prints are produced on archival stock and framed to order, then shipped direct. Nothing is held in inventory — each plate is made when it is ordered, which is why the catalog can stay wide without stacking paper in a room somewhere.