Simon Willison’s Weblog

The many lives of Null Island (via) Stamen's custom basemaps have long harbored an Easter egg: zoom all the way in on 0, 0 to see the outline of the mystical "null island", the place where GIS glitches and data bugs accumulate, in the Gulf of Guinea south of Ghana.

Stamen's Alan McConchie provides a detailed history of the Easter egg - first introduced by Mike Migurski in 2010 - along with a definitive guide to the GIS jokes and traditions that surround it.

Here's Null Island on Stamen's Toner map. The shape (also available as GeoJSON) is an homage to the island from 1993's Myst, hence the outline of a large docked ship at the bottom.

Alan recently gave a talk about Stamen's updated custom maps at State of the Map US 2024 (video, slides) - their Toner and Terrain maps are now available as vector tiles served by Stadia Maps (here's the announcement), but their iconic watercolor style is yet to be updated to vectors, due to the weird array of raster tricks it used to achieve the effect.

In researching this post I searched for null island on Google Maps and was delighted to learn that a bunch of entrepreneurs in Western Africa have tapped into the meme for their own businesses: