(This picture was taken on a rare sunny day in Poulsbo, WA, many years ago.)
“You can’t see the forest for the trees” is a common refrain when someone is paying too much attention to detail and not enough on the big picture. A cartographer who spends 90% of project time on such things as which orange-brown hue to use, which font to use in the legend, and deciding whether to use mixed case or upper-case for labels, will soon run out of time for what is just as important: the gestalt of the map. Without a unified presentation, a map product may not hold a readers attention long enough for those details to be fully appreciated or even understood.
A cartographer who spends 90% of project time on the big picture such as the visual hierarchy, choosing unified colors, and element placement also risks something: that there will not be time left to ensure the accuracy and readability of the information in the map. After all, a map that looks great at first-glance but contains inaccuracies, confusing labeling, or other such detail-problems will be useless.
These, then, are the two dangers: spending too much time examining the trees OR spending too much time thinking about the forest’s overall visual impact. How much time we spend on each of the two elements is going to depend on the cartographer’s level of experience. If the cartographer is well skilled in map details but not in big-picture elements then this cartographer is able to spend less time on the details and more on the overall picture. The opposite is also true. However, I would posit that many cartographers who are skilled in one area and not the other spend an inordinate amount of time on the portion that they are already skilled at and less on what they are not. In other words, we tend to get better at what we are good at and do not increase our skill in what we are not so good at. You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time with the parts of map-design that you are skilled at, leaving you more time to focus on those aspects that do not come as easily to you.
A typical work-flow, using the forest and trees analogy, goes back and forth between the two aspects of map-making. It might look like this:
10% – Forest
30% – Trees
20% – Forest
30% – Trees
10% – Forest
In this example I’ve split the time up to be 60% detail work and 40% big-picture work. In my mapping projects I probably spend too much time on the big-picture items and not enough time on the detail work. (Please note that for analytical GIS projects I use an entirely different approach – often focusing first on details before circling back to the big-picture.)
Readers: how much time do you typically spend on big-picture versus detail work?
Recent Comments