Here’s where I trot out, in casual-speak, some stuff about cartographic design. Some of your main choices in cartographic design are:

1) Projection (or not): Choice of projection. Do you want something equatorial that’s nice in the middle but hugely distorted at the poles? Do you want to omit projection and scale altogether such as for a diagrammatic map (e.g., transit map)? How about using my personal favorite: the winkel triple? Sometimes humor is the best way to figure out what projection to use. I’m kidding on that last one.

2) Colors: Are you going to be a neogeocarto and go for a dark background like grayish black for the continents and a saturated blue for the oceans, like the trend has been for a few years now? Do you have a lot of features to pile on the map, necessitating a subdued, light, background? Do you need to add some realism in there? If so, maybe you should take a few photos of spots with the features that you’re mapping so you can grab the colors off of those. Color can make or break a map…take your time and don’t be afraid of trial and error.

3) Typography: Do you need an old-timey feel? Maybe baskerville. A really old-timey feel? Try some calligraphy. Neat and modern? Helvetica. Interesting? comic sans. (Just kidding! Don’t get on my case.) Really nifty for a poster title? yanone kaffeesatz – it’s free. Do you have to create a feature label hierarchy? Definitely choose something that has a lot of flavors such as true bold and italics, small caps, etc.

4) Placement: The act of putting things on your map is hugely difficult. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. If you are making a trail map, don’t get caught up in the roads, topo lines, bathroom locations, and such. Sure, include them, but never forget that those trails MUST stand out from everything else. It’s even more difficult when you’re using a background map service like Google Maps or OSM that has it’s own hierarchy that you can’t do much about. Placement of all the supporting information is difficult too. Why is it that I would never generally tell someone to put a scalebar in the upper-right of a map, but yet just the other day I saw this done quite effectively? It all depends on everything else you’ve got going on in that presentation.

5) Catch-All: Perspective and 3D versus 2D; choropleth versus leader lines that connect to a chart; infographic versus full-on map; showing your map reader what you want them to see or making them figure it out; small-multiples vs. digital interactive vs. animation…
Yep, there are a lot of choices here.

And finally, the biggie:

Invent something new or go with tried and true?

I’m writing a new book on cartography. Without divulging what it’s all about just yet, here’s a post on what will become one sub-section of the book.

Typographic maps are maps that are built out of typographic elements as opposed to graphic elements; they are still spatially accurate. Instead of drawing a couple of lines to indicate a road, for instance, the road is shown via the road’s name, repeated along the length of the feature. For another example, instead of a blue blob for a lake, the lake name is the “fill” for the feature. As the typography is put together and layered, it becomes very impressionistic: you see a pattern from afar, you see the individual words close-up. Most of these maps that I’ve seen are of high-population cities, focusing on the infrastructure of the place such as roads and buildings.

It’s a pretty new genre of map design. The best-known typographic maps in the cartography world are probably those by Axis Maps. For a more free-form take on them, check out Paula Scher’s artistic maps. I’ve never created a typographic map before, so it didn’t seem right to explain the techniques and processes that go into making them until attempting one myself. Herein are the things I’ve learned so far.

Typographic map design requires:

• FONT CHOICE: obviously your fonts will make a big difference in how the map looks, so choose carefully.
• COLOR: while at first it seems like color isn’t going to be a big deal on these maps, it still has a high importance. Using color, and especially contrast between your main “blanket” word and your other words is important.
• PATTERN: to create a proper patterning effect, large features (such as landmasses) need to have a single, steady, fill with which to layer the other, smaller features, on top of. Perhaps an 80/20 rule is applicable here. 80% background words, 20% foreground words.
• CAPS: As was pointed out to me on CartoTalk, using all-caps for most of the words will be important, because ascenders and descenders in lower case words get in the way of the feature shape that you are trying to fill.

Process: The best process that I’ve uncovered is to blanket the background with a word(s) using a text fill, then layer on top of that with the smaller features. When you write another word on top of the text fill, depending on the program you’re using, you can either create a background for the text or create another polygon around the text that matches the main background color (often white, but you see I’ve used an off-white in mine). This creates a cut-out look.

This is just the beginning of my tests with typographic mapping techniques. For those who’ve already created these successfully, I’d be happy to hear more about your techniques and processes.

I’m just finishing the second birthday map that I’ve been asked to create this year. It’s a map of one U.S. state with various towns magnified and shown as insets around the main map. The main map is a topo-map with roads, county and city labels, topography, and so on. The insets are aerial photos of particular homes or areas where particular homes used to be. Interestingly, one of the insets is of a small airport, which is the site of the birthday person’s grandparent’s old farm. Since it is a nostalgic piece I chose some fancy typefaces: Elephant by Matthew Carter for the title and some supporting information and ITC Stone Serif Medium for a larger text block.

The insets are not placed on a grid in-line with the state map because this looked sterile, especially for the more intimate type of map that this is. So instead I simply fit the insets in where they would fit, in a more organic manner. There’s even a small baby picture of the person for whom the map was made on there. There’s a small picture of the map here just so you can get a bit of an idea of what I’m talking about. Please realize that, to protect the recipient’s privacy, I’m only posting a thumbnail. (Also, the title is boxed-out because it includes the person’s name.) It’s designed for a standard frame: 16″ x 20″ with a 1″ white-space around all sides.

So, if you’re a map-maker, maybe this will inspire you to add this type of mapping to your repertoire. If you are not a map-maker and would like me to make one of these for someone in your family, let me know.

Allowing the main focus of the map to spill into the main margin of the map is a nifty technique that can make a layout look more designed and even help when it comes to awkward geometries. Check out these two examples:

Digital Data Services, Inc.

Chris Behee

Today I happened across a map that has many problems, not the least of which is the fact that it appears to have been made in the year 2000 (or earlier) while it was actually designed and published in the year 2011. Back in 2000 this would have been a perfectly acceptable map. But times change, people. I’m not saying that map styles change as quickly as you change the channel on the TV, but there are some quality improvements to cartography that are made every few years or so. That’s not too much for professionals to keep up with. Even if your job is not map-making, per se; if you are publishing maps in any shape or form during your career, you need to pay attention to this stuff.

I’ve made lists of things you need to keep in mind when designing a map before on this blog. See here and here and here. But I feel the need to repeat myself from time to time, especially when a great new inspiration piece (!) comes to my attention. I’m not going to show the map that has made me sit down and right this. Who knows, I might run into this GIS person someday, and if I published the map and its author’s name, that might make things awkward. Just a bit. I mean, we all know in theory that we aren’t supposed to take this kind of constructive criticism personally, but I’m pretty sure that even the most stoic of us feels a bit of an ego set back when our work is critiqued.

So what I will do instead of showing the actual map is discuss the general problems with it and the potential solutions for it. I’m not advocating for anything advanced here like typography mapping, art mapping, 3D mapping, interactive mapping, or even super-professional cartography hall-of-fame mapping. I’m just letting you in on some simple modifications that could have been made in order to elevate this map to the current decade, and thus enhance its credibility and readability.

TITLE Use verbs in the title. Don’t use “Ocean Depth Seamless Endeavor Project,” * which is about as dull as bread without chocolate on it, and makes very little sense to most of us. Instead say something like, “Three Countries Agree to Share Ocean Depth Data.” Words like project should be avoided at most costs.

SUBTITLE Subtitles are fine. They can even include specific information to further explain something interesting about the data like, “53 new species out of 150 total, were found.” The subtitle should be offset in some way and be in a smaller font size.

BOXES You might be tired of hearing this from me, but it seems it needs to be re-said. Don’t use boxes around the map elements. White-space is enough of a separator. The boxes just don’t look good. I’m not sure how else to explain it. Oh yes, actually I do**.

COLOR I’m not usually a person who declares certain colors as not in fashion. In fact, I’ve never done so. Maybe I’ve never felt the need to before this. Anyway, don’t use this color as a background for the map page:

EXTRAS The scale bar and north arrow may be better placed on top of the map element itself, as opposed to being placed in the margins of the map page. It depends on what other things you have on the page, of course, but often you can squeeze those two items in there less obtrusively if they are over a non-essential part of the map.

That’s all I’ve got for this critique. Those changes wouldn’t have been hard to make and would have made it look so much better.

A little discussion about critique is probably warranted here. One of the problems with cartographic design has been its inaccessibility to the GIS analyst. Fearing critique or simply not thinking that one is up to the challenge of making good maps probably holds a significant portion of us back. Please don’t fear critique. Please don’t stop learning about cartographic principles just because you think you might make a less-than-stellar product. I’m probably still not at the top of my game cartographically speaking (check out the ** note below!), and yes, I still do make a lot of changes (both client led and colleague led) to my work in between design, production, and publication. It’s through these processes that we make ourselves better, and they are not to be avoided, but embraced!

*That example was made up, in case you couldn’t tell.
**Though the map on that post is really embarrassing. For need of a quick example, apparently I didn’t do anything about those awful colors.

A good cartographer keeps tabs on the most common, modern, and effective map types trending today. To help you along in this eternal quest for inspiration, I’ve chosen a couple of examples for each of four types of excellent cartographic styles.

Dark Background: Bright Highlights

Montreal Metro Map, stm

GISP Locations, Timothy Hales

Light Gray Background: Saturated Color Highlights

Territorial Expansion 1783 – 1854, Gretchen Peterson

Canvas Map Example, Voting Patterns, Esri

Bold Color

2011 Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, Escape Key Graphics

SUNY Canton Campus, mapformation, Michael Karpovage

Subtle Color

Resilient Habitats, Sierra Club, CORE GIS, Matt Stevenson

World Map, fg cartopgraphix, Francois Goulet