By Steve Cavendish

Good crowd for Kris Viesselman's "Beyond Locators" session.

Kris may have one of the great gigs of anyone here: Design Director for National Geographic Maps. She and her folks do maps for National Geographic and its sister publications, the maps you and I can buy in the store, maps for NG clients and, how freakin cool is this, globes.

Some highlights:

-- Some beautiful maps from a recent Africa issue (it may still be on newsstands) including an impressive look at the human footprint on the continent.

-- Great reference site: shadedrelief.com - National Park Service guide to color coding relief in maps.

-- Interesting to see their work for a special Katrina edition. Their idea of breaking news is obviously different than a daily newspaper, but it's interesting to see them turn something around quickly.

-- A "map" of the Stanley Cup she worked on with Kurt Snibbe at the Orange County Register a few years ago.

-- Interesting piece also out of the OCR from this year: 6-column photo on the front of houses in the SoCal mudslides with annotated pullouts in text.

-- Note to self: flip through Conde Nast Traveller more often at the newsstand. Wow.

-- Some source books: Personal Geographies by Katharine Harman, The World Through Maps by John Rennie Short, Mapping the World by National Geographic Maps