Archive for October, 2012
ArcGIS Motivational Poster
For your Friday enjoyment, here is a motivational poster I created for Tom Vought (@TomVought) and Elliot Hartley (@elliothartley) the other day. Tom had been worried that he was going to spend his day watching ArcMap’s progress bar, which had been at 0% for some time. The processing task he was performing had to do with a selection on census blocks. At one point he mused that he should work in a state that has fewer census blocks, to make his job easier.
I pointed out that there are times when Arc will appear to be working, saying “0%”, but it’s actually crashed or is in some way not doing what was expected. He replied, “I think it’s working.”
“I think it’s working” is an apt mantra for the GIS analyst profession in general, and thus the poster was made. I thought I could try to run a process myself in order to get a screen capture of the 0% bar but when I loaded up a project serendipity played in my favor and gave me a spinning wheel when I right-clicked on a layer’s properties, thus the picture of the Cache tab with nothing on it. By the way: Tom tweeted an update 28 hours later to say that his task was 50% complete.
Introduction to Cartography Workshop at Colorado State University
The sign-up form is now available for those of you who would like to attend a class I am teaching on October 26, 2012 from 1pm to 5pm at Colorado State University. The class costs $60, payable by check at the workshop or by CSU account number and is open to anyone who would like to attend.
We are going to try and have a lot of fun in class. There will be oranges, exclusive videos on cartographic workflow from some of the best in the industry, cartoons, West Wing, and much more! There will be prizes! I may actually do a bit of teaching too!
I’ll bring copies of Cartographer’s Toolkit along so workshop attendees can buy them directly from me at a reduced price. I’ll take check or PayPal.
The rough outline of the workshop includes:
- Introductions
- Coordinate Systems
- Label Placement
- Typography
- Color
- Layout Design
- Cartophilosophy
- Career Considerations / Workflow Tools
Yes, we will discuss tools of the trade including both open source and proprietary tools. But, in keeping with the tool-agnostic philosophy behind both my cartographic design books, this workshop will primarily focus on the basics of good map design regardless of the tools or the media (static and dynamic).
For those who don’t know my credentials, I’ve written two books on the subject (see side-bar). Also, here is a blurb from a recent GIS Lounge article:
Gretchen Peterson is a well-known geospatial professional who has run her own GIS consulting firm, PetersonGIS, since 2001. She has worked on a wide range of GIS projects including (just to name a few) solar energy site suitability analysis, stream restoration prioritization, wildlife corridor design, and an archaeological sensitivity model. Her extensive experience with geographic analysis and mapping forms the baseline for the knowledge she shares in her publications on maps and cartography. Peterson shares her thoughts about cartography and the geospatial field regularly on her blog and via her @PetersonGIS twitter account.” ~GIS Lounge
A Few Cartography Tips Gathered From Around the Web
- Turning a map into an aged paper handout: using blend modes in PhotoShop or Gimp. I’ll bet you can also use TileMill to do this now, with their new color blending options. This is a short how-to, worth looking at.
- Jerry’s top ten crime mapping tips: This is an old pdf from 2001 that starts out with a sarcastic list of map design considerations, akin to the one I put together on a previous April Fool’s Day. The only one I disagree with is the north arrow, which in many cases is just unnecessary. At least he states that it should be simple and small.
- Improve your cartography-ten tips for on-screen maps: This is mostly about color, which the author asserts is the most important thing on a map. I agree that you need to experiment a lot with color before settling on a color scheme.
Tuesday Cartography Notes
- Geo means Earth. The Earth is in the shape of a geoid. Therefore, the Earth is the shape of the Earth. Any questions?
- Steve Waterman created a new projection called the Waterman Polyhedron in 1996 and updated it in 2012 with new satellite imagery. He wrote a poem about the projection. Anyone who writes a poem about projections has a sufficient mixture of outright nerdiness combined with risky creativeness to deserve our attention.
- There’s a new book called The Revenge of Geography that calls for a new profession dubbed sociography. The assertion is that the physical landscape has shaped the course of human history and will continue to do so in the future. If his thesis is correct, and most certainly it does have at least some veracity, then people who can design maps and interpret maps will be a shoe-in for this sociography role.
Place Settings and Maps
I was reading a design magazine article over the weekend that provided tips on how to set a well-designed table with miss-matched pieces. (I kid you not.) Though the topic was table settings the design concepts were generally applicable, even to map making. Here are a few:
If you are tempted to have the same plates, glassware, and silverware at each setting, think about how much more richness and variety you can get from miss-matched pieces if you do it right. Similarly, with a map, it is nice to have some variety in balance and weight. For example, a road map can benefit from intentional de-densification immediately surrounding the city areas. This provides some denser areas of the map where it makes sense to do so, and less dense areas of the map in rural locations to create a balance.
Mix fine patterns with bold patterns. Applying this to map design, don’t make a map that contains crosshatching in every single polygon. Rather, intersperse the crosshatch fill with areas of solid fill. Furthermore, because crosshatching carries such a heavy visual weight, apply it only to the smallest or fewest areas.
Use colors that go well together, like blue patterned plates with solid gray plates. In map design, choose your color theme and go with it: lots of crazy bold colors, monochromatic, complimentary colors, or analogous colors. The key is to enforce that color scheme throughout the design and production process, lest it get away from you.
A Little Rule About Icons on Maps
Posted by Gretchen in Best Practices on October 3, 2012
Considering using icons on a map? Think about this first. How many icons of a single type will be on the map? Three or more? Great. One or two? Not so great. If there are only one or two locations where than icon will be used, there’s a good chance that you should use a label for it instead of an icon.
Icons add an additional step for the map reader in that they require the eye to move from the icon to the legend to determine what it means. If you can eliminate this additional step as much as possible, through the use of direct labeling, then you should.
If the icon is a simple and easily understood one–for example:
or
then it may be an exception to this rule, since the map reader would not necessarily need a key to decipher it. Icons that need deciphering, then, should be kept to a minimum where possible.
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