A packet of thank you notes arrived today. This makes it all worth while.

I’m just back from teaching 70 2nd graders about maps and I am happy to report that I not only survived but I was duly impressed with their existing knowledge. I know there are several readers who volunteer their time in school classrooms. This post covers the content of the talk so that you can steal any ideas that would work for you. A previous post covered some general ideas.

These three topics were designed to take 5 minutes each.

1. Major Types of Maps Each student received one map card, of which there were three types. They held their card in their hand until they were called upon to show it. We discussed road maps first because these are the maps that students are most familiar with. Students raised their hands and told the class what you can do with a road map such as: figure out how to get to an aunt’s house, where the school is, or how long it takes to get somewhere. At the end of the road map discussion, I asked everyone with a road map card to hold it up. We discussed physical maps next. I held a relief map up and asked if anyone knew what the large blue area was (ocean), what the bumps are (mountains), and what the blue lines are (rivers). Everyone with a physical map card held theirs up. Last we discussed political maps. I explained this one, since it is a bit trickier. We talked about how political maps show the boundaries and names of countries, states, and cities, though they don’t have to show all of those things. Everyone with a political map card held it up. See the end of the post for links to the maps I created for these cards.
2. Webmaps Next, I told them about this fourth kind of map. We put a tourist map of Colorado on the smartboard and I asked for a helper to click the map layers on and off as I took suggestions from the students. They chose to look at trains, welcome centers, and hot springs. The helper figured out how to click layers on very easily. This particular map is nice and simple so it is easy to discuss. Next, I asked if any of the students had seen Google Maps (lots of hands) and we put that on the smartboard. One student asked to see where Grand Junction is in relation to Fort Collins so we typed those in and used Get Directions. They were impressed. We also did a show of hands for who had seen maps on cell phones, on car dashboards, and on tablet computers.
3. What Mapmakers Do We discussed how mapmakers need to decide what colors to make things, how to make the roads wider or narrower depending on how important they are, what shapes to make things (we pointed out the tree symbols used for parks on Google Maps), and other related topics. One student wanted to know how mapmakers figure out which mountains are which and where they are. I wasn’t prepared for such an astute question so I fumbled around with words about “map data” and satellites making the map data.

The great thing was how excited the kids were to hear about maps. I’ve made two of the trading card documents available below, each in a single jpg or as a 10-per-sheet word document for you to print and cut. The road map cards used OSM data and were zoomed in to a portion of town that the students would recognize. Because the road maps were quite custom, I’m not posting those here. You’ll have to make or find your own road map cards.

Physical Map Trading Cards For Kids Word Document

Political Map Trading Cards For Kids Word Document

A local second grade class is going to start a geography unit in February and I was asked to give a talk to them. While mulling over the various things I could teach, it dawned on me that this is a very exciting time for maps. I don’t have to go in there, pull down a U.S. map from the wall, and proceed to point to it while naming off the states and their capitals in a Ben Stein Bueller voice. Indeed, there are a lot of really cool things to discuss…

• The orange-peel projection!
• There’s a Map on My Lap!
• GPS and the Smartphone!
• Where to go Skiing this Weekend!
• The Valentine’s Day Coloring Map!
• Cartograms, diagrams, the four-color theorem, etc!

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Are you starting a new cartography career from scratch? Or are you trying to figure out how to add “map making” to your already long list of skills? Here are the basic areas to educate yourself in, as detailed in GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design:

1. Tap your inner creative genius. Artists learn through both observation and practice. You are probably already “practicing” by trying to make maps yourself. But don’t forget to take the time to also note the best practices in other’s maps and in other artwork as well.
2. Layout design. Start with a list of all elements you’ve ever seen on a map. Each map you make will have a few or many of these elements. When it is time to arrange the elements on the printed page or the web page, experiment a lot instead of just sticking with the first arrangement.
3. Fonts. While most purists will insist on using the word “typeface”, it is fine to use the word “font” colloquially. Know that selecting a good looking font is important for the overall look of the map. Nuances in font character, weight, and style all lend themselves to the look and feel as well as the legibility.
4. Color theory. Learning the basics of color theory does not take long but applying it can be a challenge for the novice. Learn color theory, by all means, but also try using palettes that are pre-constructed by borrowing palettes from existing sources.
5. Pay attention to feature type. Mapped features, whether they are roads, currents, utilities, basins, or others, often have traditional map colors and styles. Research these before applying your own. For example, the U.S.G.S. geologic age color scheme is something you want to be aware of when displaying geology data.
6. Designing slide maps is different from designing for poster gallery maps, which are both different from designing webmaps. Mind the particular quirks of the media to maintain legibility and optimal information transfer for the device and the audience.

Once the basics are in place, it may interest you to have a cheat sheet to help you decide the type of map you want to make and some of the elements that will make it look its best. You can make your own shop book or start with the items in Cartographer’s Toolkit:

1. Colors: palettes pre-tested on maps, with color-blind simulations, for various types of feature representations from coordinated to ramped to differentiated.
2. Typefaces: also pre-tested on maps, in sans serif, serif pairs, to provide a quick visualization of how the same map will look with different typefaces along with descriptions about the typefaces.
3. Patterns: A selection of new and noteworthy map patterns (similar to “map types”) illustrated and described so that you always have the right kind of map in your idea bank. Add to this as you see other new types. Map styles are proliferating with the influx of new, non-traditional map-makers (think web developers and graphic designers) and the influx of new open source software. Keep up to date on these as someone else’s map pattern might be particularly suited to your future mapping needs. These patterns can also be built upon and provide the creative basis for your own enhancements and innovations.

In yesterday’s workshop we had a projection demonstration. We took an inexpensive inflatable globe, drew a couple of secant lines, cut open the inflated globe from the poles to the secant lines, and flattened it.

You can discuss how the areas above and below the secant lines would have to be stretched if you don’t want a disconnected projection, or you could keep them disconnected but sacrifice continuity. This is also a great visual for discussing the six things that will be either compromised or preserved in various projections: area, distance, direction, shape, bearing, scale.

Notes on the demo: You might want to have a volunteer do the cutting to make things more fun. The globe was $7.00 so this could get to be too expensive if you were doing it all the time. You might just get two inflatable globes and show the cut-up one next to the inflated, in-tact, one instead of buying a new one for every demo (though that isn’t quite as fun for the students.)

Cartographic design skills are acquired through a 50/50 mix of study and practice. Anyone who is making maps is practicing whether they realize it or not. Every map you make is better than the one you made before it. So, if you are putting in the requisite practice, why study?

One of the answers is that studying the principles of good cartography will make you more cognizant of the variety of maps that are possible to make in our current environment. We aren’t just talking about static versus dynamic. We’re talking about cartograms, temporal animations, micromaps, illustrations, flow arcs, and polar views, just to name a few. The variety of maps has increased in the last few years, especially with the influx of developers trying their hand at interesting data visualizations. Keeping up with the latest developments in this realm is possible through a number of study methods, but by far the most effective is watching the cartography twitter streams. If there’s a new way to make a map, you will see it there first, and if that map is any good, it will be retweeted many times before you see it profiled elsewhere in the GIS or cartographic literature.

Another answer is that studying cartography absolutely leads to faster and greater gains in your design skills and thereby your ability to impart useful and elegant information to your audience. By taking cartography classes, reading books on map making technique, and reading your online GIS and cartography magazines, you’ll be able to absorb more of these techniques. Don’t just rely on a slow absorption rate, however. Make a bigger design leap by carefully curating a portfolio of ideas that can be easily accessed.

Remember, learning cartographic principles and staying abreast of the latest technique means:

• Your work gets noticed more.
• Your message is more easily understood.
• The product is distributed more frequently.
• The product is distributed to more people.
• More potential for the boss to understand the map (promotion?!)
• Getting more consulting work than those who’s maps still look like they’re from 1999.
• Having more tools in your toolbelt so you can fit the right map to the right data.

And the biggest reason? 

Your skills can truly enable you to improve someone’s quality of life. Whether its making more readable navigational maps, or elegantly conveying correlative and causative variables in crime data or health data to the general public, or providing more useful park information maps, studying cartography enables you to produce maps that are informative, inspired, and original.