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.)

If you are using small caps for your labels (which we should do more of, they look good!), use true-drawn small caps. What this means is avoid using the “small caps” font changer in your software. (In ArcGIS this is found in the Properties dialog, Change Symbol, Properties, Formatted Text, Text Case.) In the following example, the first Hello There is written in 20 pt Fontin Sans Small Caps and the second Hello There is written in 20 pt Fontin Sans Regular with the Small Case option.

If you are creating a lot of labels in a small amount of space, use light or medium weight condensed typefaces. They are built specifically for small spaces in that the white space in each letter is less apt to disappear and the descenders will be shorter. Furthermore, serif condensed is okay for small type, but once you get to about 8 pt or smaller its best to use sans serif condensed. This example is taken to the extreme. You can barely read the 3rd Hello There, written in a sans serif condensed font at 7pt. However, you certainly can’t read the 2nd Hello There, written in a serif condensed font at 7pt.

Bold text is difficult to read at small sizes because it fills in the white spaces in the letters.

While many of us simply italicize labels for waterbodies such as rivers, oceans, and lakes, don’t forget that you can use a typeface that specifically has oblique and reverse oblique lettering for these labels.

Color blindness – also called color vision deficiency – is fairly prevalent. It is usually of genetic origin and, depending on the type of color deficiency, occurs in approximately 1% to 8% of males and much fewer females. As I say in the book:

If you create a map for your work‑group, and your work‑group consists of three Caucasian men, the chance that one of them is red-green color deficient is about 22 percent.

One way to make your colors distinguishable is to simply ensure that each color has maximum brightness (in the HSV system it would correspond to the value). A color deficient individual will see the colors differently than others, but will be able to understand the color coding none-the-less. Along these same lines, you can make certain that the colors are not pure. For example you want to avoid pure red: 255, 0, 0 next to pure green: 0, 255, 0 (RGB).

You can double check your final product for color deficient readability using a tool such as Vischeck or Color Oracle. You can also read more – and see some map examples – in this great article: Be Kind to the Color Blind.