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 designed and created by David DiBiase and I back in 1987 for David Woodward’s map design course (and in the University of Wisconsin Cartographic Lab), is repeated thirteen times in seven of the chapters, annotated to show how the concepts and ideas in these chapters play out on the map.

The repeatedly annotated Voyager map serves as an example of map design in practice, but also a guide to “reading” a map from the perspective of map design.

Martin Dodge suggested the annotated maps be available together, for instructional purposes. A good idea! So here they are. Each individual map on this page is a 800k PNG file (click for full size).

A PDF file (8.8mb) with all thirteen higher resolution TIFF images is available here.

The Voyager map project was quite a bit of fun to create back in the day. It won a map design award, was published in the book about the Voyager flight, and printed on paper as part of a promotion for the Waukesha County, Wisconsin Airport. I cannot imagine anything much more exciting than that.

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The second map in the series prefaces the initial chapter in Making Maps 2nd edition, and poses a series of questions that will be addressed in future chapters (and annotated Voyager maps):

Chapter 2, What’s Your Map For?, sets the context of the map (and of its re-creation for the book) and how such context shapes the design of the map:

Chapter 6, The Big Picture of Map Design, repeats the Voyager map five times, focusing on the key map design concepts covered in the chapter. This is where the map flips orientation south up (a controversial design choice, according to some reviewers: good! Think about why such a choice is controversial, and if it should be [or ask your students to do so]):

South is now up (so the story reads from left to right):

Annotations about map pieces including title, scale, explanatory text, legend, directional indicator, border, sources, credits, and insets & locator maps:

Annotations about visual arrangement including path, visual center, balance, symmetry, sight-lines, and grids:

Annotations about graphical excellence, based on Edward Tufte’s ideas, including complexity, detail, design variation & data variation, context, revision, non-data ink, data-ink ratio, explanatory text, editing, chartjunk & map crap, redundancy, and multivariate data:

Chapter 7, The Inner Workings of Map Design, reveals the Voyager map with no visual differences (a confusing mess of lines and type):

The map with visual differences is then annotated, with regard to key methods for establishing visual differences, including detail, edges, texture, layering, shape, size, closure, proximity, simplicity, direction, familiarity, and color:

Chapter 8, Map Generalization and Classification, annotates the Voyager map in terms of the generalization concepts of selection, dimension change, simplification, smoothing, displacement, and enhancement:

Chapter 9, Map Symbolization, annotates the map in terms of the visual variables: shape, size, color hue, color value, color intensity, and texture:

Chapter 10, Words on Maps, annotates the Voyager map with regards to typographic variables including typeface, type form, type weight, and type size:

I have a few ideas for additional annotated Voyager maps (such as a full color map) which I hope to cobble together in the future. If you have any other ideas for variations that might be useful or interesting, let me know.

The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 5 (detail 1, close-up)

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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 topographic map of Egypt in 6 sheets, published by The Survey of Egypt in 1910, scale 1:1,000,000.

Click on any map for a larger version of the scan.

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 5 (detail 1)

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 1 (detail 1)

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 1 (detail 2)

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Note the type leaking over the map border (Mediterranean, Lake Borollos, Gharbia)

The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 1 (detail 3 – close-up)

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Note the type leaking over the map border (Mediterranean, Lake Borollos, Gharbia)

The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 1 (detail 3)

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 3 (detail 1 – close-up)

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 3 (detail 1)

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 5 (detail 2)

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The Survey of Egypt, 1910, 1:1,000,000, Sheet 6 (detail 1)

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Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas by Denis Wood with an introduction by Ira Glass. Pub date: Nov. 12.
$28  .  Paper  .  112 pages  .  85 black and white illustrations, including more than 50 maps  .  ISBN: 978-0-9799562-4-9

Preorder

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These maps remind me of all the radio stories I love most. After all, most radio is a boring salaryman, waking up before you and me to announce the headlines or play the hits to some predetermined demographic. Yet some radio stories elbow their way into the world in defiance of that unrelentingly practical mission, with the same goal Denis Wood’s maps have: to take a form that’s not intended for feeling or mystery and make it breathe with human life. —Ira Glass, host of This American Life

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 word.

They are useful for guiding map makers and helping map users understand how maps work.

There are numerous sets of cartographic design principles. My previous post on Edward Tufte distilled six map design principles (or commandments as I called them) from Tufte’s first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

In 1999 the British Cartographic Society’s Design Group proposed “Five Principles of Cartographic Design.” When I first came across this set of principles I thought them interesting – even a bit passionate – a rare state of affairs in the often stoic world of cartography. I added a few maps and my own comments (in italics).

More on these map design principles below: Concept before Compilation, Hierarchy with Harmony, Simplicity from Sacrifice, Maximum Information at Minimum Cost, and Engage the Emotion to Engage the Mind.

Cool maps below include: Geo-Smiley Terror Spree Map, The Continents and Islands of Mankind, Hate Groups and Hate Crimes Map, and Where Commuters Run Over Black Children, Detroit 1968.

Five Principles of Map Design

Concept before Compilation
Without a grasp of concept, the whole of the design process is negated. The parts embarrass the whole. Once concept is understood, no design or content feature will be included which does not fit it. Design the whole before the part. Design comes in two stages, concept and parameters, and detail in execution. Design once, devise, design again. User first, user last. What does the user want from this map? What can the user get from this map? Is that what they want? If a map were a building, it shouldn’t fall over.

…or, why are you making your map, who is the audience, and what do they want from the map?

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Hierarchy with Harmony
Important things must look important, and the most important thing should look the most important. “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Lesser things have their place and should serve to complement the important. From the whole to the part, and all the parts, contributing to the whole. Associated items must have associated treatment. Harmony is to do with the whole map being happy with itself. Successful harmony leads to repose. Perfect harmony of elements leads to a neutral bloom. Harmony is subliminal.

…or, what’s important? Make it visually jump out. What’s less important, but necessary in a supporting role? Make it fall back…

(Geo-Smiley Terror Spree Map. Reproduced from Making Maps, p. 144)

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Simplicity from Sacrifice
Great design tends towards simplicity (Bertin). Its not what you put in that makes a great map but what you take out. The map design stage is complete when you can take nothing else out. Running the film of an explosion backwards, all possibilities rush to one point. They become the right point. This is the designer’s skill. Content may determine scale or scale may determine content, and each determines the level of generalization (sacrifice).

…or, less is more…

(Redrawn from William Bunge, The Continents and Islands of Mankind. Areas in black have more than 30 people per square mile. Reproduced from Making Maps, p. 160-161)

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Maximum Information at Minimum Cost (after Ziff)
How much information can be gained from this map, at a glance. Functionality not utility. Design makes utility functional. All designs are a compromise, just as a new born baby is a compromise between its father and mother. The spark which makes a map special often only comes when the map is complete.

…or, carefully select the content and marks on the map (symbols) to maximize the map’s information content and communication capabilities…

(Hate Groups and Hate Crimes Map. Apparently more hate groups in a state means fewer hate crimes. Reproduced from Making Maps, p. 208)

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Engage the Emotion to Engage the Understanding
Design with emotion to engage the emotion. Only by feeling what the user feels can we see what the user sees. Good designers use Cartographic fictions, Cartographic impressions, Cartographic illusions to make a map. All of these have emotive contents. The image is the message. Good design is a result of the tension between the environment (the facts) and the designer. Only when the reader engages the emotion, the desire, will they be receptive to the map’s message. Design uses aesthetics but the principles of aesthetics are not those of design. We are not just prettying maps up. The philosophy is simple, beauty (aesthetics) focuses the attention. Focusing the attention is the purpose of map design!

…or, embed a bit of passion…

(Where Commuters Run Over Black Children, Detroit 1968. Detroit Geographical Expedition. The title says it all.)

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 back in the late 1990s.

The book looked great: its design communicated the importance of design (when most other cartography and information graphics books were clunky and poorly designed). The tone was serious and high-minded: I was designing information graphics. And I think I absorbed Tufte’s minimalist design philosophy, although cartographic design, at least the way I learned it, was largely minimalist, with no allowance for flourish, fake 3D embellishment, or other chartjunk (or “map-crap” as I call it in the Making Maps book).

While I won’t impugn the importance of lofty inspiration, I did wonder what kind of practical guidelines I could derive from Tufte’s book. You know, specific stuff that would help me to design and make better maps. I sat down one day and made a list of Tufteisms from the book: that list is below.

20 Tufteisms from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

1. Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data – a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.
2. Graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency.
3. Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.
4. Graphical excellence is nearly always multivariate.
5. Graphical excellence requires telling the truth about the data.
6. The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented.
7. Clear, detailed, and thorough labeling should be used to defeat graphical distortion and ambiguity.
8. Write out explanations of the data on the graphic itself. Label important events in the data.
9. Show data variation, not design variation.
10. In time-series displays of money, deflated and standardized units of monetary measurement are nearly always better than nominal units.
11. The number of information-carrying (variable) dimensions depicted should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data.
12. Graphics must not quote data out of context.
13. Above all else, show the data.
14. Maximize the data-ink ratio.
15. Erase non-data-ink.
16. Erase redundant data-ink.
17. Revise and edit.
18. Forgo chartjunk
19. If the nature of the data suggests the shape of the graphic, follow that suggestion. Otherwise, move toward horizontal graphics about 50 percent wider than tall.
20. The revelation of the complex.

I recall being somewhat underwhelmed at my practical how-to list. But I pondered how they related to my map making and cartography in general, and reduced them into fewer categories, the Six Commandments.

Commandment 1: Map Substantial Information, including (1), (2), (3), (4), and (20). Unfortunately, such choices were not up to me. For example, I might be told to make a map that showed the location of a dozen cities and a study area in Bolivia, and there was no way to make that interesting, multivariate, or complex. Bottom line, many maps are of boring data, chosen and assigned by someone else, and there is not much the map maker can do about it. But these five related Tufteisms did make me understand the potential for maps of non-boring data… and maybe if the clients, the people who decided what data to map, read Tufte they would do a better job at selecting interesting, multivariate, complex data to map.

Commandment 2: Don’t Lie with Maps, including (5), (6), (9), (10), (12), and (13). This evokes two classics, Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics (1954) and Monmonier’s How to Lie with Maps (1991, 2nd edition 1996). The idea of “lies” resonates deeply with some people, but it is a complicated issue. In the Making Maps book I mapped out poverty rates by county in the US, classified with different classification schemes (unclassified, quantiles, equal interval, natural breaks, and a unique scheme). This produces, of course, five quite different looking maps that, as no classification scheme is illegal or inherently “lies,” are all potentially viable. Maps are always made with a purpose, and purpose will drive the choice of classification scheme. Each scheme has advantages and disadvantages and each obscures and emphasizes different aspects of the data. Beyond the falsification of data, I find the concepts of “lies” and “truth” a bit too simplistic: it is a lot tougher than that. It’s about being smart and critical and understanding the inherent trade-offs among diverse map design options.

Commandment 3: Effectively Label Maps, including (7) & (8). This was not a revelation to me, as cartographers spent a serious amount of effort working out guidelines for the effective labeling of maps. Tufte did encourage me to include explanatory text on maps: tell people what you believe the map is showing and why it’s important. You cannot communicate everything with single words and non-text map symbols, and the map reader will see where you are coming from (and that will help them be critical of your map design choices and what you are communicating with the map).

Commandment 4: Minimize Map Crap, includes (11), (14), (15), (16), and (18). Map-crap, chart-junk, all the same: graphic dross that encrusts a map. Big, honkin’ north arrows (you don’t even need a north arrow if the orientation is obvious), fancy borders, fake 3-D effects, etc. More often map crap is the result of poor design choices for elements that need to be on the map. For example, a graticule consisting of black lines: the graticule may have to be on the map, but it should not stand out. Light gray lines, or even white lines (reversed out of a gray – as with the map that heads this posting – or colored background) would be preferable. Just like Tufte’s graph reduction exercise on pp. 126-7 in my 1st edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. This minimalist design approach is stern and serious, and may be inappropriate when designing maps for advertising, promotional purposes, or fun (does anyone do that?). Chartjunk and map-crap have a place.

Commandment 5: Map Layout Matters, includes (19). Layout is a bigger issue than this one point from Tufte and it is an issue that is not stressed in map design texts (although I do devote a decent chunk of a chapter in Making Maps to map layout). It is difficult to talk about map layout (or the layout of information graphics in general) in the abstract. But layout strongly effects the look and feel of the map, and can make a map easy or difficult to read and interpret.

Commandment 6: Evaluate your Map, includes (17). Evaluation is really important and, for whatever odd reason, is typically not part of information graphics or cartography texts. There are different kinds of evaluation, from documentation of your design and production process, to formative evaluation (where you or others critique and revise your map as it is produced), and, finally, impact evaluation where formal methods are used to assess the effectiveness of the map among a subset of its intended audience. I devote parts of two chapters in Making Maps to these different kinds of evaluation.

The 20 Tufteisms and the Six Commandments are superficially less than I expected, from the perspective of practical guidelines. But, upon reflection, they do touch on many of the fundamental issues that determine if a map design is going to work or not, and what could more practical than that?

Maybe someday I will review Tufte’s subsequent books: Envisioning Information (1990), Visual Explanations (1997), and Beautiful Evidence (2006).

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.

I include a simple monochrome graphic design guide in the Making Maps book in chapter 7, on intellectual and visual hierarchies (excerpt). Three downloadable versions of that guide are available below (in Illustrator, Freehand, and JPG formats).

It is relatively easy to create (or modify) such design guides with whatever mapping software you are using (even customized for specific projects), and then print or view them on the final media upon which your map will appear. For example, if you plan to print your map on a photo quality ink jet printer, print your design guide on that printer, and use the printed version to guide your graphic choices (not your computer monitor, where the colors will look significantly different).

The files below were created on my Mac and I cannot guarantee the Illustrator and Freehand copies will work with your computer, operating system, or software. You can at least use the JPG version as a model for creating your own guide in your software (with your choices of colors, fonts, symbols, etc).

Download:

Making Maps: Graphic Design Guide: Adobe Illustrator CS2 version
Making Maps: Graphic Design Guide: Freehand MX version
Making Maps: Graphic Design Guide: JPG version