It has been ten years since I wrote the first edition of Designing Better Maps, so it has been a curious adventure to revisit the content in detail. Each fall, I rework much of this content when I teach introductory cartography at The Pennsylvania State University, so a good proportion of it remains familiar and useful for explaining how to design maps using geographic information system (GIS) software. My experiences over the past decade have changed the proportions in my teaching emphases.
I teach less on color now. That is surprising because it was the primary emphasis in my research for many years. ColorBrewer has become so well established in GIS use that it is now built into Esri’s ArcGIS Pro application. Open-source programmers have built the color schemes into their own tools, such as R (a spreadsheet of RGB [red, green, and blue] color schemes is online to ease this adoption).
I teach more on topographic mapping, partly because I have learned more about this challenge after years of working on research grants with the US Geological Survey (USGS) and participating in a 2007 National Research Council committee to envision the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS). Through these projects, I have learned the importance of automating labeling and symbol design settings for mapping an entire city, watershed, or even the entire country in all its variety from one set of related decisions implemented with GIS tools. I teach less now on how to handcraft the single map display or atlas map series, though the map design principles are the same.
Through the research with USGS-CEGIS, I have also learned about how GIS data can be better structured to support automated cartographic design. The research groups I have been part of have been working on topographic mapping through scale, and we are all now used to online tools that offer views at a series of scale levels. One key for mapping through scale is to have an importance attribute for features. This importance attribute should provide sufficient levels to produce a hierarchy of representations. Importance levels allow size and lightness ranges among symbols for a feature class. Importance levels also allow variation in label size, style, and color. Most importantly, the importance attribute allows map designers to systematically and selectively remove content for smaller-scale views.
Because mapmakers often do not have datasets on each theme repeatedly compiled at multiple scales, the challenge of multiscale mapping is to pull together data from multiple sources, with varied levels of detail and precision. Thus, I have included a new chapter in this edition that organizes many feature types for reference mapping and basemaps.
I also improved the resolution and quality of the map examples in this edition. The first edition of this book came out the same year that Google Maps did. Since that time, the look of online maps has been a major driver in competition for map users, with increasingly sophisticated integration of base information and clear visual hierarchies. Esri’s map services offer varied high-quality base layers and thematic topics, and the design and usability of consumer navigation services have been getting increasingly better. In the first edition, I captured images from the ArcGIS display that provided guidance in a style relevant to what GIS users were seeing with their desktop tools. Ten years later, our laptops and mobile devices have increasingly high-resolution displays, obviating the need to assume designers are working in a coarse-resolution environment.
I write to you from the perspective of a teacher and cartographic researcher with thirty years of experience. I am now a full professor and head of the Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University. I enjoy the challenges of organizing and leading this large department, which includes a substantial geographic information science faculty. When I started my position as head, I joked with the faculty and graduate students that they should expect to be color-coded. In fact, color-coding is used in most of our decision making, whether it is moving offices, sorting out graduate assistantships, partitioning budgets, or highlighting areas of excellence. Who knew you could run an academic program as a thematic mapping effort!
The book’s revision process occurred in a different context than the first version. I now have funds to pay graduate and undergraduate students to assist me through the E. Willard Miller and Ruby S. Miller Professor of Geography endowment, which I hold for three years. Likewise, I have a good space and equipment for working with the students in the Peter R. Gould Center in the department, which I directed for a portion of the revision period.
Elaine Guidero assisted on the typography and labeling chapters. She also organized permissions for images and data use. Bill Pongpichaya Limpisathian reworked and updated the census data examples throughout the book with newer data. He also prepared most of the graphics in the new basemap chapter and repaired graphics throughout the book. Paulo Raposo selected the sites we emphasize for new basemap examples and assisted with data collection for them. He also improved the projections section. Aaron Dennis prepared numerous new thematic maps, working carefully to choose bivariate maps for new sections. He then pulled these apart into their single-variable parts to provide new illustrations for topics in earlier sections that carry over from the first edition. Aaron was also the main researcher for the new section on intellectual property.
Charlie Frye, chief cartographer at Esri, worked with us early on to plan new topics and rearrange sections. I always enjoy bouncing ideas off Charlie. Over the past ten years, he has begun teaching university courses, so he has a broad range of experiences and opinions about what new GIS mapmakers need to know. These experiences and opinions helped me refine this second edition.
Lynn Usery, director of CEGIS, has been a primary force behind my new knowledge on topographic mapping through a series of research grants. I have collaborated with Barbara Buttenfield and Larry Stanislawski through the past decade, learning about national hydrographic data, terrain, road networks, and many other topics. There are many others at USGS who have encouraged and improved my work over the past decade, and I would like to particularly thank Bob Davis, Mike Cooley, Kristin Fishburn, Helmut Lestinsky, Eric Constance, Kari Craun, and Mark DeMulder for their interest and guidance.
At Esri Press, Kathleen Morgan, acquisitions supervisor, was quick to respond to my interest in revising the book. She put together external reviews for a draft prospectus and brought a serious portion of the energy behind getting this edition completed. She and Riley Peake did the hard and weekly job of keeping me on task despite all the new distractions of being a department head. I worked with Kathleen on permissions years ago and knew how both exacting and kind she is. She is a treat to work with on a big project. I would also like to thank Peter Adams, former Esri Press manager, for his enthusiasm for the second edition. I continue to be completely impressed with the quality and care that Esri Press brings to book production.
Cindy Brewer
State College, Pennsylvania
June 2015