********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Today I’m thrilled to publish this guest post by the extraordinary freelance cartographer Hans van der Maarel of Red Geographics. He’s also the administrator of the Cartotalk forum and you can follow him on twitter via @redgeographics. He’s from The Netherlands.
********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

I’m a mapmaker. I love making maps, I love looking at them and I love talking about them. I’m also a cyclist. I love riding my bike and I love talking about it. Sometimes I get to combine the both, for example when I’m taking part in an organised ride – or when I go watch a cycling race to combine it with my other hobby, photography. Of course I want to know where I’m going to ride (or where the best spots for photos might be), so I check the event’s website to see if they have a map.

The one thing that bugs me is the fact that in many cases, the ride or race organisers made a map by simply taking a screenshot of Google Maps and adding some information (lines, points, arrows, notes) to it in Paint. It does the job, yes, but it’s not pretty and it may not even communicate the right message. What’s even worse is that sometimes even large public or private organisations do this. Maps are often added as an afterthought.

Of course if you’re reading this it’s quite likely that you’re producing maps yourself, so you don’t go for the Google Maps technique. Instead, you work, obviously within the constraints of your time and budget, to make the best map you can. You collect the required data and make a nice design – you pick colors and styles and finish the whole thing with legend, scale bar and all the other map paraphernalia. But a map can be much more than just a pile of data with some visualisation rules applied to it and I would like to urge you to spend some more time on the design phase, because it matters. In a guest post on visual.ly Daniel Huffman argues that cartographers are storytellers. A map is a story and spending a bit of time to consider the message you’re trying to convey can really improve it. By consistently delivering high-quality, well-designed maps we can prove our worth as cartographers and promote maps as a legitimate and valuable form of communication.

So here’s some general tips:

• Know the story you’re trying to tell.
• Consider your audience. What can you expect them to know? Make sure you tailor the map to them.
• Understand your data, make sure you use data suitable for the scale you’re working on. If it’s too detailed, or not detailed enough, try to find something better. Also don’t be afraid to manually redraw things to get a better looking end result. You don’t always have to use data, cartograhpy is after all an art form. Don’t be afraid to let go of geographic accuracy if it will improve your storytelling.
• Consider your styles. Look at the map from a little distance and check whether the things that stand out are in fact the things you want to stand out. Also make sure you don’t do things that your output media can’t support. I once had to make maps that were to be printed on fabric, this meant pure white was off limits because the fabric would shine through at those spots and the minimum text size was 8 points, whereas on paper you can often go as small as 5.5 points.
• Consider your map content. For every data layer that you add, ask yourself whether it’s really necessary. This also goes for map paraphernalia such as north arrow, scale bar and legend (yes, even a legend can be optional, and labeling a legend as “legend” is quite unnecessary). Edward Tufte wrote an excellent book on this subject: “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”, I can highly recommend reading this.
• Consider your texts. Are you using the right font? Are they big enough, but not too big?
• Consider whatever is going on around the map. A big pet peeve of mine is reading about towns A, B and C and only seeing D, E and F on the accompanying reference map. If your map is going to be part of a larger layout, see if you can get a mock-up of that to work off. Of course you also need to coordinate font and color usage.
• Get inspired! Either by collecting (images of) maps that you think are really well done or get exposure to art and design through some other way (visit a museum for example).

The ultimate goal of this is to produce a design that’s balanced and gets the message across without containing too much information that might confuse your map readers. It’s not easy, or even possible, to come up with a value estimate for good design and sometimes you’re simply not going to be able to spend as much time on it as you want because of budget and/or time constraints. Or you don’t always have a say in the final design of the map. The person you’re designing it for may have something to say about it as well, and sometimes their views contradict yours. Still, you should endeavour to do as good a job as possible within those limitations.

If you’re looking for inspiration I can highly recommend the NACIS Atlas of Design, as well as the Cartotalk forum.

When people write articles for ArcNews or other similar publications you can tell that, for the most part, they put 100% into the written word and maybe 20% into the graphics, usually maps, that go along with the article.

I was just talking to someone who does a lot of expert witness work, and he mentioned the oft-heard statement that a picture is worth a thousand words. He’ll create a lengthy document explaining the specific facts in a case and what does everyone home in on? The graphics.

Maps are so important to the conveyance of understanding. They need to be thought out with the same care and perfection that we strive to achieve with the written word.

A recent tweet claimed, “With open data, everyone can be a cartographer” (@onlmaps).

Great! And also, oh no.

I’m not sure if we exist, you and I.

Before you get worried that this blog is turning existential, let me explain. The other day Fast Company posted a short article about Stamen Design. The post starts with, “We used to have cartographers.”*

Excuse me? Let me show you some Maps Behaving Badly and then we’ll talk about why there is still a strong need for cartographers and the cartographic skill that is espoused in this blog. As a matter of fact, there is still a cartography profession, and some of us are, believe it or not, much sought after.

Despite the fact that we know that our profession is thriving, expanding, and changing at great velocity these days, there are still a lot of people who are confused about cartography, what it is, and whether or not cartographers still exist.

Before getting too down about it, though, ponder a term that the GIS and cartography community doesn’t use much but that, if employed more widely, would help the cause:

Digital Cartographer**

For those who are making webmaps on a regular basis, adopting the title Digital Cartographer could rid yourself of the need to go on, ad infinitum, about what GIS means, or what webmapping is, or what geoanalytics are, while you futily try to explain to a layperson just what it is exactly that you do for a living. I think the title Digital Cartographer can stand for itself and be readily understood by most people. Solution?

*Hat tip Andy Woodruff
**It’s a little disconcerting that the first time I ever heard this term, or perhaps the first time I ever took note of it, was in a tweet by the comedian Rob Delaney.

What’s limiting us when it comes to cartography? Well, A LOT OF THINGS. But here’s one I haven’t talked about much on the blog:

Tool fatigue can cause you to make ugly maps. It’s not that your design skills are bad, it’s that your tool skills are bad.

Today, as I was exploring new tools to create maps (exhibit A, TileMill project in progress)*, it dawned on me that a lot of the problem with bad map design is simple. If you don’t know a tool well enough you spend 90% of the allotted time learning the tool, leaving very little left over for modifying and fine-tuning the design, leading to ineffective design.

In this blog, I usually try to focus on cartographic technique and leave it up to the reader to figure out how to wrangle their tool(s) of choice into making well-designed maps. However, when you spend an hour or so just trying to do basic coloring and labeling at different zoom levels, you’ve got little energy left over for decent design, let alone beauty. However, this leads into my oft-repeated advice to never give up on a map once it is “good enough”. You must persevere even if you are trying out a new tool and it is taking everything you’ve got just to figure out the halo syntax or where the line generalizing functions are. Also, be sure to factor that learning time into your deliverable schedule!

Exhibit A: a new TileMill map, in progress: Colors need to be fixed. Large region names are not dark enough. Small label conflicts. Transparency must be increased.

*Yes, I’ve used TileMill before but need to get to the good stuff!

You need to be proficient in programming. Or at the very least, able to write a script to automate a workflow.

Remember that time I posted about what to be a cartographer in 2012? By and large, the readership agreed that development (maybe I should have just referred to it as “programming”) was a key component in the modern-day cartographer’s toolbox.

Along those same lines is today’s post on GeoMusings, Bill Dollins’ blog, arguing that programming is now an essential skill in a GIS analyst’s repertoire as well. This post is essential reading for GIS analysts and cartographers, as the arguments hold true regardless.