SWAG STORE

Message from Swag Team:

Every place on Earth has a fingerprint.

Not the whorls, loops, and ridges kind. Its fingerprint is written into the landscape—rivers and streams, ridges and valleys, roads and railroads, buildings and bridges, city blocks and all the other natural and human-made features that accumulate in a place over time.

No two combinations are exactly alike.

As geospatial professionals, we spend our careers studying these patterns. We map them, measure them, analyze them, maintain them, occasionally argue about how they should be represented, and develop the slightly peculiar ability to recognize a place from a handful of lines on a screen.

So that became the inspiration for the CMPASS 2026 conference design.

Strip away the labels, street names, aerial imagery, landmarks, and all the other clues we normally use to tell us where we are, and a place still has an identity. Natural features shape where and how we build. The things we build reshape the landscape in return. Layer upon layer, they create a geographic fingerprint found nowhere else.

And the fingerprint on this year's design isn't just any place. 

It's downtown Kalamazoo—the roads and waterways surrounding the Radisson where we'll gather for CMPASS 2026.

Which means there's a decent chance that sometime during the conference you'll look down at your shirt, look up at the street around you, and realize you're standing somewhere inside the map you're wearing.

Admittedly, that's probably more exciting to us than it would be to the general public.

But that's why these are our people.

Everywhere is somewhere. And nowhere else is quite like it.