Between 1983 and 1984, the town of Nantucket adopted a program called the Nantucket Islands Land Bank. The purpose of the Land Bank was to “acquire, hold, and manage important open spaces and endangered landscapes for the use and enjoyment of the general public.” Understanding how different land uses were geographically organized, as these maps display, was crucial for programs like the Land Bank to effectively carry out their work.
In the maps themselves, design conventions like the dashed lines that grow darker and denser at seemingly regular intervals along the coast reveal their origins in the 1980s. At this time, map production often depended on “pen plotters,” or large format printers that operated by mechanically moving a pen across the surface of a paper. Because pen plotter maps simply printed geospatial data that had already been composed on a computer—as opposed to manually overlaying dozens of semitransparent mylar sheets on top of one another—cartographers could use pen plotters to iteratively experiment with color and style. Each Nantucket map here applies different styles to the same data.