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.