(Unbelievable genius emanating from this brain tonight: the concoction of a 5 C title in less than 10 seconds!)

It looks like I’ll be putting together a workshop for Colo. State University this fall on cartography. We’ll focus on the basics:

Good design takes time
Trial and error are your friend
Peer review is essential to a map that makes a lasting impression
Studies of the great stuff: National Geo., new OSM-based layers from Stamen Design, Tufte principles, etc.
Critiques and “what’s wrong with these maps? maps”
Work flow and software to accomplish it
User experience

There won’t be a lot of time to discuss everything in-depth. For example, I may just touch on user experience but not go into a big treatise on ways/means to accomplish a good outcome for that goal.

I’d really be glad to hear what you all have to say about what things are most important to cover in a 4-hour cartography crash-course. Think about what you wish you would have been taught that would have made your life a lot easier. I’m open to any suggestions you have, either privately by email or via the comments here. Thank you!

My first book, GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design, lays out the methods for creating great maps in terms of creativity, color, typefaces, layout, and data-specific recommendations (geology, political boundaries, elevation, to name a few). It has received a lot of praise. There’s also been a few naysayers out there who are mostly hung-up on its practicality and who would rather see cartography highly systematized.

There are always a few people at the very ends of the spectrum: those who feel cartography is primarily an art and those who feel it is a science. Those on the art-side think that teaching cartography or receiving degrees in it is ridiculous, let alone PhDs. Those on the science side would rather that nobody practice cartography without a thorough understanding (read: traditional learning) and application of the rules and theory.

The majority of map makers today are in-between these two camps both in their allegiance and their practices. Cartographers really need to remain open-minded about both the art and the science sides of cartography. To be receptive of the art-side is to accept that the best innovations spring from unforeseen places. To learn the science is to make life easier for both yourself and your map readers by applying common standards.

The book makes this distinction, encouraging the blending of both camps into your professional life for superior outputs.

Information Graphics by Sandra Rendgen, to be available via Taschen May 27, 2012, looks like it will be an enormous book of both importance and physical weight. It’s 8 pounds, 480 pages, and from what I can discern, almost entirely graphics. James Cheshire reports that the information graphics featured as examples in the book are not just good-looking, they are vetted for data integrity as well. I am ordering my copy today and am expecting it will provide numerous inspiration pieces for map layout, colors, typography, and data display. There is no limit to the amount of inspiration we need in our daily creative lives. The price is hardly prohibitive either, considering the content and the possibilities for enhancing your future work.

Gaining Competency With GIS: How-to Manual for ArcGIS Desktop Version 10 by Gregory Newkirk and Trevor Perkes is an 80 page kindle book released a few months ago, priced at $7.95. I haven’t read it because, well, I don’t have a need to learn ArcGIS considering I’ve been using Arc (and predecessors) since ’98, but the look inside feature shows that it could be a great little introduction to the software. I always think that an introductory text should be short, sweet, interesting, and full of pictures. Later texts can get into the nitty-gritty details, but introductions should be designed to make things gentle and easy. If that’s what you’re looking for, then this looks like a good, cheap way to go as it appears to have all of those things.

This book has been well received by the GIS-learner community. It is a step-by-step manual type of book that takes you through the basics. If you want your hand to be held while exploring ArcGIS 10, this is probably the best book to get. No, I don’t have this book myself (let’s really hope I’ve got the basics down by now!) but if it’s anything like the one I used Way Back When, it won’t do you wrong.

This book has been named in many different forums lately. It’s a classic and was re-published by Esri Press last November. You’ll see it get mentioned from time to time on CartoTalk and here’s the newest mention that I’ve come across – LinkedIn discussion on the need for good cartography.

Don’t forget about my three books:

A review of this is supposed to come out in a Dutch magazine soon.

Colors For Maps and Type For Maps
A review of these may make it into the next GISCI newsletter.

A Mystery Book
I have an idea for the next ebook but unfortunately am not quite sure how to implement it at this time. I’d like it to be an interactive ebook with many very short video clips (10 seconds each, one per page, about 50-70 pages long). Hopefully something can be accomplished on that front soon.

I just finished writing an article for GISuser.com (I’ll post it here soon) defining various new geo-terms including the term “geoglitter.” While I think that this particular term is somewhat indefinable, I attempted to illustrate it for the article in my own way.

The aim was to use an illustration that was a literal interpretation of the term GEOGLITTER. How hard could that be? As it turns out, it was a lot harder, and messier than expected. First, I purchased seven colors of glitter from the craft store, then I designed a world-map in black and white where the water is black and the land is white. That was the easy part, of course, being that I do make maps for a living.

The map was printed on card stock on the laser printer and “caught” immediately as it was spit out of the machine so the black wouldn’t smudge. Here came the hard part. I wanted to use the seven colors to denote the seven continents. However, the divisions between continents are very difficult to get just right using glue and glitter! We’re talking MAJOR generalization of line-work here. The line separating Europe from Asia was particularly difficult.

Thankfully, though, I was able to produce at least an approximation of where those divisions are. The only real disaster turned out to be in allowing some of the green glitter to slide down into the white (Antarctica) glitter, which was thereby irretrievable.

THE OUTCOME I believe the major outcome for me with this project has been that creating map art is an incredibly fulfilling and rewarding learning opportunity. To be honest, I had not realized exactly where some of these divisions were prior to this project.

TEACHING IDEA It follows that this would be an excellent way to teach children about the continents. They should be given a blank map and glitter (or just markers, but glitter is much more fun) and be required to figure out where the divisions are themselves, either by looking it up on the web (older students) or by giving them a separate map showing the divisions (k-2nd grade). This type of hands-on learning should allow for more memory retention than rote memorization.