It’s amazing how every day things can inspire our maps. I recently was looking at my copy of Gift from the Sea, which reminded me of the fact that I have my own seashell collection from our recent trip to Costa Rica. Then I got to thinking about that in connection with the fact that many maps are absolutely beautiful even if they use very little color or color variation. Well, so are shells!

Here are some of the shells, arranged by a professional. But not really. Okay, my secret was to stand on a chair and take their picture, after having put them on a black shelf. You can see that they all look fairly uniform in color. However, when I used my color-picker software to get the RGBs (It’s called “Amazing Screen Color Picker” – anything that says it is amazing must be so, right?!), you could see that there are quite a few nuances in the colors and one could make a very nice map color scheme out of these. And of course that is exactly what I did. Here are the colors:

In RGB triplets, in the order you see them, they are:

214 222 225

222 236 245

170 148 137

224 207 213

166 147 167

You can also view the palette and the HEX equivalents, here.

*Full credit for the pun goes to Kris.

Over the summer we took a long trip to Costa Rica to learn Spanish. On our second or third day there, some other people at the place we were staying – who were volunteering to teach English at the village school – handed us a map. It turned out that they had already been there for a month and were leaving shortly so they no longer needed it. They had been given this map by another local, who had done the following:

• printed out a Google map of the village on an 8.5 by 11,
• put another piece of paper on top of the Google map,
• used colored pencils to trace and color in the roads,
• added arrows pointing off the map to show which roads led to which other villages,
• drew in local restaurants and beaches that he liked and labeled them,
• drew in local groceries (they are small and numerous there) and labeled them.

The end result was a hybrid between the Google map and a newbie-centered view of the village. It was charming in that the roads and buildings were colored in by hand, the labels were in regular handwriting, and it reflected one person’s view of the local scene. It was useful in that we might not have discovered certain restaurants and it would have taken us much longer to make our own mental maps of the place. It was accurate in that it was based on an accurate base map with proper scale. I guess one might call it a Google Map Mashup on regular, old fashioned, paper.

We need some color inspiration from time to time. One of the things I mention in the book is to look for any kind of inspiration source that suits you to find colors that will work for your map. For example, you could look at book covers, art work, website designs, and other maps. The great benefit of doing this is that you already know the colors have been vetted through eyes other than your own. You can always change the colors as you design if and when needed but it sure is a great way to get started.

One map I thought of lately that would be great to use as an inspiration piece is the London Tube Map. Did you know that the London Tube Map, one of the most famous maps in the world that is still used, has been worked and re-worked since 1908? Henry Beck, who designed the map from 1931 to 1960 changed the colors quite often. We could guess that the colors on this map would be great for print-color legibility and contrast.

So how do you go about using them? I found the Pantone colors listed on several websites, translated them into RGB colors, and then uploaded them onto my new COLOURlovers page. I’ve used COLOURlovers quite a bit over the years for inspiration but this was the first time I had used it to upload my own palettes. It was so easy to do! You can retrieve the palettes and RGB triplets that go along with them from  my COLOURlovers page.

When you take a look at my COLOURlovers page you’ll see that I’ve created some other interesting palettes too. Most of them inspired by other maps I really liked, though perhaps not as famous as the London Tube Map. In the meantime you can gaze at the two lovely London Tube palettes right here: