Cartographer's Toolkit

I just finished making a series of maps and was trying to note my processes while creating them. Here were my thoughts during the week of map-creation:

• Decide work-flow / software first. I didn’t have a lot of time to make these so I decided to stick with a full ArcMap production flow without using Illustrator. I’m not as good at Illustrator and work super-fast in ArcMap. I might have moved everything to Illustrator at the end to finish up some line work (simplify lines) but that would have taken more time than it was worth in this case. The lines looked decent enough anyway.
• Uh yeah – don’t forget that you shouldn’t put a north arrow on a map that’s in a Robinson projection because in Robinson, north changes depending on where you are. Use graticule lines to indicate north or nothing at all.
• Colors still take a long time to come up with. For one of the maps, which showed European countries in a 4-color scheme, figuring out what those four colors should be took several hours of trial and error. And I was even working with the colors for maps booklet to help me along. You just never know how it is going to look on the particulars of the geography you are working with until you try.
• Think about what your data is telling you and try to show it with your design so others can get that same message. Don’t underestimate the power of a good think-session.
• When making both a color and a grayscale version of the same map – as was the case here – create the color version first, then modify to grayscale.
• The least fancy but easiest way for me to create great labels (if there aren’t an unwieldy amount) is to auto-label then convert those labels to annotation and hand-modify from there.
• Don’t forget to zoom in on the layout to place things exactly right but also don’t forget to zoom back to a 1:1 scale periodically to make sure it looks good there too.
• For some reason ArcMap makes my 6-point Arial labels look impossible to read on-screen. But when I print out the map or convert to PDF and open in Acrobat they are legible again. Know what your final output is and design for it by doing some test-exports, even at the beginning of the project.
• If you have a list of specifications for the map, be like Santa Clause and check them twice.
• If there are examples of maps similar to what you are trying to make, it can save a lot of time to sift through them and determine what you’d like to emulate and what you want to avoid.
• You know you are well immersed when you consider at least 20 different shades of blue for the ocean background before settling on one, then changing your mind again.