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Archive for the ‘07 Hierarchies’ Category

To understand map design, and how maps work, it is useful to see how map design concepts play out on a real map. One of the significant updates to the 2nd edition of Making Maps was the inclusion of a map of the 1986 trans-global flight of the experimental aircraft called Voyager. This map, originally [...]

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 5 (detail 1, close-up) ••• Found while cleaning out an old map cabinet: oceans of just about nothing, punctuated by signs of a minimal landscape. Soiled, creased, tears, dusty. Thumb-print and fading pencil marks, from someone who stared at this map a long time ago. Details from a [...]

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••••• That a cartographer  could set out on a mission that’s so emotional, so personal, so idiosyncratic, was news to me.     —Ira Glass, host of This American Life ••••• Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas by Denis Wood with an introduction by Ira Glass. Pub date: Nov. 12. $28  .  Paper  .  [...]

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Making maps is rife with rules. But following rules does not necessarily produce a great (or even good) map. It may be the implementation of broader design principles that leads to a successful map. Principles are an intellectual generalization of a broad field of knowledge: a kind of map, in the broadest sense of the [...]

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Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1998, 2nd edition 2001) is a classic book, arguably his best, and certainly a key text in the field of information graphics (which encompasses cartography). I know some cartography courses use the book as a text. I recall being inspired by the book as a neophyte cartographer [...]

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Back in the day when I was working at the University of Wisconsin Cartographic Lab we created graphic design guides with different size type, lines, and area shading. Such guides provide, for example, a quick idea of what 10 point black type over a 50% gray background looks like, and help to see design alternatives. [...]

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