Cartography, Design, and Fine Art

In college, Chris Silver Smith attended the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Design in 1992. Although this was a degree primarily geared toward students intending to go into architecture as a career, the program was fairly multidisciplinary and combined fine arts, mechanical drafting, commercial art, and even programming, in addition to heavy focus on aspects of architectural design. Very advantageously, Smith took courses from a prescient professor, Terry Larsen, now Associate Professor Emeritus of Visualization, who introduced him to developing HyperText documents on a Sun Microsystems computer — HyperText a short time later was to evolve into HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which remains the formatting protocol for displaying internet documents. Smith also took programming in C on a VAX mainframe under Professor Larsen. This training paved the way for Smith to learn programming in some of the foundational languages used for web applications — PERL and PHP, etc.

After graduating from Texas A&M University, Smith was hired on as professional support staff for the university, working in the Cartographic Laboratory, where he initially served as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings and maps for publication in academic journals. After a little over a year, he was promoted to manager of the office. While working at Cartographics, Smith created the first digital map of the Texas A&M Campus, which enabled more efficient creation of variations, and which he used in providing the first interactive internet map for the university’s website:

Smith also was tapped to create a new logo for the 12th Man Foundation. The logo has since been used on many thousands of clothing products and car decals.

Smith also converted the university’s official seal and other logos and iconography into a digital format (EPS) for the first time and marketed and sold the files on Mac and PC disks for use on computers.

In addition to scientific illustrations that he produced for professors and researchers, Smith also created a comprehensive Texas A&M University Campus Map with Points of Interest. The map was made to be usable as a poster, both front and back, with a 3-D, bird’s-eye view of the campus, and vignettes of the top attractions were photographed and illustrated around the perimeter of the map. The map was designed to be folded down compactly like a roadmap as well. The map was published by the Texas A&M University Press.

Due to publisher requirements, the map elements were hand-drawn on seven layers which had to sync perfectly when the photographic plates were generated for printing.

Smith’s background in cartography later became very helpful after he left Texas A&M and worked for Verizon’s Superpages.com. Smith was involved in geocoding of addresses for businesses and map display design for the site. Smith also became a member of a small team in 2001-2002 that developed Superpages’ Map-Based Search system:

It is no coincidence that these map-based search interfaces may look familiar — within a year after the launch of Verizon Superpages’ local map search engine, Yahoo! released their own highly-imitative map search as well in 2005. →

Shortly after Yahoo!, Google launched Google Maps, which was very similar to Yahoo!’s interface, but it added near-live panning and zooming controls with AJAX, making the map search more engaging and attractive to users.

Chris Silver Smith has worked in mapping and local search technology for many years. While working for Verizon, Smith became the tech liaison for a number of the company’s syndication deals, allowing other large internet websites, portals, and search engines to add Verizon’s yellow pages content onto their websites, white-labeled to appear with those websites’ branding elements. Companies where Smith served as tech liaison included AOL, MicroSoft, InfoSpace, and Google.

As Smith worked in the convergence of mapping, yellow pages, search engines, and internet marketing, it put him in a unique position as an early developer in the field of search engine optimization (“SEO”) and particularly, Local SEO, as well as general SEO and Image SEO. Smith blogged about these topics, and eventually came to the attention of SEO peers and internet marketing conference organizers. Smith was invited to write for Search Engine Land shortly after it was launched in 2006, and in the first year he wrote a definitive and influential piece, “Anatomy & Optimization of a Local Business Profile,” which garnered a SEMMY recognition award.

Smith has long provided SEO consulting to a number of Fortune 500 companies and well-known retailers, including providing Local SEO guidance to e-commerce, local retailers, and restaurant and hotel chains. As part of that work, he has developed geocoding and mapping applications using Microsoft’s mapping API, Google Maps APIs, and other mapping/local APIs.

Smith’s deep background beginning in analog cartography methodology all the way through to contemporary internet map application development, provides him with expertise and skillsets.

Outside of Smith’s professional work, he pursues hobbies involving fine arts, cooking, and hand bookbinding/publishing/collecting. Check out some of his artwork from his student days here and the book he wrote, designed, and hand-bound here.