The Map I Used to Make by Hand

From Hand-Built Maps to One-Click Exports

I spent a few years doing cartography and geospatial work for clients before pivoting to NextMaps. Mostly mining and resources companies needing presentation-ready maps for reports, board decks, investor updates. The kind of thing that looks simple but takes most of a day to do properly.

The process was always the same. Source the data, clean it, reproject it, style it, wrestle with the legend, export it, realise something was off, do it again. Every map was a small project in itself. Clients would send through updated tenement boundaries and you'd start the whole loop over.

I don't say this to complain. I enjoyed the work. But the overhead was real, and most of it had nothing to do with the actual geology or the story the map was supposed to tell.

That overhead is part of what I've been trying to remove with NextMaps.

What we just shipped

This week we released map exports and live shareable embeds. Here's what that looks like in practice.

You set up your map the way you want it. Watchlist holders highlighted in their colours, geology and magnetics layered underneath, mining sites filtered down to what's relevant, roads and towns for context. Upload your own spatial data if you have it. Then you open the Share and Export panel.

On the export side: upload a logo, set the text and panel colours to match your branding, give it a title, and export. You get a clean, high-resolution map ready to drop straight into a report or presentation. The legend builds itself from whatever layers you have active.

On the share side: one click generates a live embed link. The same map, interactive, that you can share with colleagues or embed directly into your own website or project pages. No login required to view it.

The whole thing takes a few minutes. The output looks like something that used to take an hour or two to generate even if you knew what you were doing.

Great Boulder Resources - Side Well Example Embedding/Share Link

The full circle part

I built the tool that would have partly automated most of my old job. That's a strange thing to sit with. The clients I was making maps for back then could have done a lot of this themselves, and probably would have preferred to. They knew their projects better than I did.

The person closest to the geology should be able to produce the map, not spend their time waiting on someone else to do it.