Creativity is innovation, it is novelty. Should we imbue our cartographic products with creativeness? Absolutely.
While I advocate starting off a cartographic project by gathering colors, layouts, fonts, and such from other works, this does not mean that you should leave your own creative inspirations out. It can easily come into the process in the middle – while you are going about trying to fit your work product into the mold of something else that’s already done before, you often need to re-shape that original mold to fit your data and ideas into it.
From the standpoint of GIS cartography we are most concerned with conveying information, of course. This means that while your creative endeavors might produce original or novel outputs, you must be certain that your output is also useful and appropriate. What makes a map beautiful is its ability to show off your information in its best light.
(This is in no way a put-down of Marge Map, which has lots of usefulness as a humor piece. I mean, look how her hair goes clear out to the right-side bar.)
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