Oddly enough, I’m flipping through the November 2010 Fast Company, which arrived in my mailbox yesterday, and see an article on ATM design! Apropos of my post on ATM design from the other day.

According to the article they are focusing even more on aesthetics (by way of futuristic looks, apparently, but also by way of simplification) with these new machines. The article, ATMs of the Future Boast Sleek Consoles, makes the claim that ATM producers want to improve their product because ATM usage has been declining. However, I wonder if this is misguided given the fact that ATM use might be more a function of how many people are using electronic point-of-sale transactions instead of cash.

*Note, I wrote a whole long post on this and it got lost on the way to the presses. Here is the shortened version.

Yucky default legend, good only for maps that you don’t care about:

Here’s a really nice way to present a color ramp. Yes, this was done in ArcMap. You just have to convert the legend to graphics, ungroup them, then fool around with all the settings and move things around until it looks decent:

What if you want to go nuts and turn a color ramp onto its side? (A very easy way to give a more professional/unique look to a legend.) Use a screen shot program – I use MWSnap – to take a screen shot of that portion of the layer properties dialog that shows the color ramp horizontally. Then just insert that image into the map. You have to keep the size small since the resolution may be low, but that hasn’t been a problem for me so far. Here’s where you clip it from the layer properties dialog:

Why spend a great amount of time creating a map? Why not just slap your data onto a layout, pick some colors at random, and use default legends, for example? One of the most succinct and best ways of explaining why we should spend the – admittedly large – amount of time that it takes to make a good map comes from the Dec/Jan 2009 issue of  DYNAMIC GRAPHICS + create* magazine:

Design motivates consumers and educates the uninformed

If you start to internalize the importance of good design then you might not wind up making something as unreadable as this:

And perhaps you could create something more like this:

Background information: The Ohio telephone services area map is an actual map available from an actual agency, or at least it was in 2008 when it was published. The re-worked Ohio map is my own creation that I made for illustrative purposes after downloading the data from the same agency’s site. The main difference between the two maps is that mine actually has a visual hierarchy. That is, the first thing you see are the area code colors and the legend that goes with them. The second thing you see are the outlines for the telephone service areas, the third are the labels which denote which agency services which area – you can’t see the labels here because I’ve kept the image small so you’ll have to trust me on that one. The first map attempted to show each of the 36 – 36!!! – service areas with a different color. Obviously that didn’t work and they resorted to hashing and patterning to further distinguish them. Why not just label with a code as I have done and provide a look-up table? Well, it takes time to come up with those kinds of solutions!

Caveat: We all make bad maps. Especially at the beginning of a career. If you see a good map don’t think it was always good. It’s very likely that it was a mess in the beginning. Just like the first-draft of a paper, it usually needs a lot of work before it is great.

*The link to the magazine is here but their print magazine is much better looking than their website.

Basin (watershed) Boundary maps often seem to befuddle the novice cartographer. How do you show a bunch of polygons on a map, but distinguish them from one another, while also showing what is underneath them? A big mess results when you use a bunch of different colors in thick outlines that all have the same visual weight. You would have to be extremely good at picking colors to do this right. Casing (outlining) some of the basin boundaries and not others further ruins not just the aesthetics but also muddies the message. In this particular map, it would be much better to use a fill instead of an outline.

Yes, boundaries can be tough to map, but it isn’t as if others haven’t been successful at it. Do a simple search for basin/boundary maps and find some that do look good. Proceed from there.

This one’s a bit better because we now see a definite hierarchy. First, the basin outlines, then the rivers inside. The basin outlines fade inward so as to not so completely overwhelm everything. The rivers/streams are in a very light gray so they recede into the background while still being there to inform:

Then we get to the good stuff. In the basin map below, it is interesting that it still achieves a hierarchy even though all the major background information is in dark, saturated, hues! Our first instinct about visual hierarchy is that the background needs to be light and the basins have to pop with bright/thick colors but here they haven’t done any of that. In this section, you can order drugs online, including generic viagra. In fact, it is almost opposite: darker background and slightly lighter basins. Even that thin brown outline visually separates without cluttering.

This one is great too, and this time we’ve got a more traditional hierarchy with a lighter background and darker basins. Notice especially that the basins are easily visible as brown outlines, all the same color. As an aside, notice how the water background fades toward the bottom of the map.