Cartographer's Toolkit

Cartographic design skills are acquired through a 50/50 mix of study and practice. Anyone who is making maps is practicing whether they realize it or not. Every map you make is better than the one you made before it. So, if you are putting in the requisite practice, why study?

One of the answers is that studying the principles of good cartography will make you more cognizant of the variety of maps that are possible to make in our current environment. We aren’t just talking about static versus dynamic. We’re talking about cartograms, temporal animations, micromaps, illustrations, flow arcs, and polar views, just to name a few. The variety of maps has increased in the last few years, especially with the influx of developers trying their hand at interesting data visualizations. Keeping up with the latest developments in this realm is possible through a number of study methods, but by far the most effective is watching the cartography twitter streams. If there’s a new way to make a map, you will see it there first, and if that map is any good, it will be retweeted many times before you see it profiled elsewhere in the GIS or cartographic literature.

Another answer is that studying cartography absolutely leads to faster and greater gains in your design skills and thereby your ability to impart useful and elegant information to your audience. By taking cartography classes, reading books on map making technique, and reading your online GIS and cartography magazines, you’ll be able to absorb more of these techniques. Don’t just rely on a slow absorption rate, however. Make a bigger design leap by carefully curating a portfolio of ideas that can be easily accessed.

Remember, learning cartographic principles and staying abreast of the latest technique means:

• Your work gets noticed more.
• Your message is more easily understood.
• The product is distributed more frequently.
• The product is distributed to more people.
• More potential for the boss to understand the map (promotion?!)
• Getting more consulting work than those who’s maps still look like they’re from 1999.
• Having more tools in your toolbelt so you can fit the right map to the right data.

And the biggest reason? 

Your skills can truly enable you to improve someone’s quality of life. Whether its making more readable navigational maps, or elegantly conveying correlative and causative variables in crime data or health data to the general public, or providing more useful park information maps, studying cartography enables you to produce maps that are informative, inspired, and original.