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Four Map Styles Worth Emulating


A good cartographer keeps tabs on the most common, modern, and effective map types trending today. To help you along in this eternal quest for inspiration, I’ve chosen a couple of examples for each of four types of excellent cartographic styles.

Dark Background: Bright Highlights

Montreal Metro Map, stm

GISP Locations, Timothy Hales

Light Gray Background: Saturated Color Highlights

Territorial Expansion 1783 – 1854, Gretchen Peterson

Canvas Map Example, Voting Patterns, Esri


Bold Color

2011 Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, Escape Key Graphics

SUNY Canton Campus, mapformation, Michael Karpovage

Subtle Color

Resilient Habitats, Sierra Club, CORE GIS, Matt Stevenson

World Map, fg cartopgraphix, Francois Goulet

This entry was posted on October 5, 2011, 1:45 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. #1 by Parker on October 5, 2011 - 2:02 pm

    Thanks Gretchen. I’m a huge fan of metro/subway maps. There is something to be said for the de-resolution of the spatial data that makes them so much more understandable for a traveler. (See http://www.docstoc.com/docs/84875603/Sound-Transit-System-Map). It’s often forgotten that too much cartographic detail (squiggles in the road) can lead to a lack of clarity.

    Regarding light gray backgrounds: did you see that ESRI released a light gray canvas basemap? (http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=8b3d38c0819547faa83f7b7aca80bd76) I love where they’re going with this and appreciate that their basemaps exist… however, I think they have some tweaking to do on this one. It’s strange that parks still show up as green, as it greatly overemphasizes them. Also, I’d love it if the basemaps included some faint topographic relief (which works well with gray-scale maps). The gray-styled Google Map, I think, works a lot better…

    …but two big thumbs up for gray (and subtly-colored) basemaps in general…

  2. #2 by Parker on October 5, 2011 - 2:05 pm

    Wow. Ok. Sorry I missed that you included the gray ESRI map.

  3. #3 by Gretchen on October 5, 2011 - 2:13 pm

    ArcMap’s Smooth Polygon and Smooth Line tools (ArcInfo license only) should help a lot of GISers deal with the “squiggly” data issue, if only more of us used them. Of course, with subway maps in particular, one of the main cartographic simplifications is the lack of proper scale, which is actually a good thing for those maps.

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