If you didn’t go to Ignite Spatial Northern Colorado 2.0 last week, you missed an excellent talk by Brian Timoney. In it, he discusses four famous cartographers: Matteo Ricci, Gerardus Mercator (i.e., Gerry Kremer from Flanders!), John Seller, and Sir Robert Schomburgk. Some excellent quotes from the video:

“If you’re not excited about the colander on the gift registry, maps make wonderful gifts.”
“GIS people are horrible business people.”

Timoney talked to me at the end of the meeting about his quest to find a famous female cartographer. (If you know of one, let us hear about her in the comments!) Although he didn’t have much success he did mention that it was his theory that the wives may have had a large roll in the maps that their husbands made even though we don’t know it. These were family businesses back then, and the maps were constructed on the family property, not in large offices. Something to think about!

Watch the video to learn four life lessons. Enjoy.

Sometimes it is so difficult to put together a web map, whether for yourself or your client, that once you have it working and live you wipe your brow, give yourself a pat on the back, inwardly give a big sigh of relief that you were actually able to get it to work, and consider it done.

Because of the initial functionality barrier, the development process stifles creativity and stifles design. It’s not a new concept in GIS. Typically the technological sophistication appears before the aesthetic sophistication.

Unfortunately we are now at a point where the proliferation of downright terrible looking maps has become a blight on the profession. If you are a web map developer who hasn’t paid much attention to design in the past then this is the number 1 area that I recommend that you spend your professional development time on.

An ability to both create web maps that work, and web maps that people actually use, is now important (unsurprisingly). Prove that you can achieve both of these outcomes and your career will soar.

Do you think that GIS professionals are woefully under-educated in the realm of projections and scale? And if so, do you believe this has important implications to cartography? During a discussion about this on Twitter recently it came to light that we need to distinguish between GIS users and GIS professionals. GIS users – those who, for example, use Google Earth to plot their vacation spots – may not know about projection and scale.

When we speak about GIS professionals though, we need to expect that our colleagues are educated, well informed, individuals who have this basic knowledge under their belts either through their schooling or their own personal education on the job. Anything less is to be negative to a point of downgrading our entire profession as a bunch of idiots who don’t know the basics of our field. Let’s not be that way. Let’s assume that others are just as well-informed as we are, okay? Let’s not go around smacking others with our elitism.

At any rate, how much does scale and projection have to do with cartography? If we are talking about cartographic design then these matter very little. If we are talking about cartographic truth then these could have a fundamental impact on the end-result of a map making effort. Today when I was talking with the personnel at the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University, my own feelings were mirrored when I was told that the problem in map design is not the lack of fundamental understanding of projections and scale.

The major problem is that very intelligent analysts, scientists, programmers, are producing data and then trying to communicate their data via very badly designed maps. It isn’t that they misrepresent information on their maps. No, it is these problems that are most at the forefront:

• Too much clutter
• Lack of organization
• Poor color choice
• Attributes that should pop are in the background and attributes that should be subdued are in the foreground
• Labels incorrectly placed or not placed with enough care
• Lack of a central focus

These are the things I am most interested in teaching. These are design aspects that many GIS professionals are lacking and which, when learned, can enable our map products to take on that level of design excellence that leads to vastly improved communication.