2020.08.26

Paper Maps, Web Maps, Good Maps

Adapted from a talk given at the Portland Cartography symposium, a look at how media informs design.

Internet and screens,

Worked for three yeas with the Esri Portland dev team, sent a log of time working on arches developers and arches online. After that, I started my ow studio practice, publishing, GIS consultant work, technical director / Dev director at Fuzzco.

Toady we’re going to talk about paper maps, and web maps and good maps and taking some one that magic of paper maps, and how paper maps do what they do so well, and bringing sthat to places like screens and the internet.

I spent time with esri thinking about what maps are, and what maps do. Pat of this is because my own background is in the arts. I studied as a fine art printmaker and worked I print making shops, and I was immediately seeing parallels between printmaking history and mapping history and how there was this major disconnect that happened when the internet happened and we started with eb maps and ‘slippy maps’, that are now just known as “maps”. And a lot of what I was thinking about was how works work in a signal to lnoise sort of space. What they are trying to do is take all the of messiness of the world and reduce that down to like a single single that does a single thing. This of course I’m sure your familiar with, and if not I recommend reading Eco:

Borges Quote about the art of cartography in the empire

The idea of a map as big as the place being mapped is not new. Lewis Carol wrote about this in the 1880s, this is Borges writing in the 40s, this was taking and Eco wrote an essay about this int he 60’s, and even a couple of years ago there is still art being made about this idea. This is a map of the gallery as big as the gallery. The idea behind this is what a map does … this is clearly a useless map. But it’s also the best map. It has the highest fidelity possible. It’s The realest map. But it’s presenting all of everything, its presenting all the noise and your loosing the signal. So thinking about these ideas about what makes a map good, and not only good but also useful and makes a map do its job, I started to think a bout maps as context. They don’t do anything by themselves, besides provide context. Maps are, at their real core, and the root of thing, the map is a miniature that pivots around the body to represent the gigantic enormity of the physical world. Thats my art degree coin out. What I mean by this is that maps are useful because they are small than the thing they are mapping. Which is not a controversial idea, demonstrated by the person trying to use the 1:1 map. But its an importune idea, because smaller is only relevant at the scale of “smaller than what, bigger than what?” How does it relate to the body? A paper map talks a city, which I cannot relate to, or I can elate to in terms of how I move through that city, and it turns into into a thing that I can be bigger than. It takes a thing that’s bigger than us, and makes us bigger than it.

In doing so, it takes all the things that we actually already know about the world and it just points to them. The map is an index, it has a quality of saying “you see this line? I am references this river that you know.” And through that reference I can say “this line is this big according to body, its pointing to this river that I know, which is this big compared to my body”. That gives us a way to anchor ourselves into the rest of the map and that maps the map useful.

Maps are useful when they show things like mt. St. Helens, and we know how big that is compared to our body. We’re small. Thats how we know how big these lahars are, we use the map as arefefce to ourselves.

In doing that, the map provides us with information that we don’t know, that we can’t relate to ourselves. Like the lahars, likelandsclides, like things that big or abstract . The way that they do that is what makes them special.

I mentioned earlier how my history with printmaking as dovetailed with my experience with making maps, the more I read, the more I saw that the history of maps and the history of technology maps is directly correlated with the history of printmaking materials.

Early maps are all hand drawn, the original way of making images. In that way you see a lot of maps that use the mark of the hand. They use use the tools of the hand to make marks that represent other things. And that advances through time to woodcuts and lithography, and engirding, and digital printing was a major step where we started using other sorts of tools where we started using things like rainbow maps and gradients all of the suddenly. Making a gradient on a woodcut is doable, but not super easy to control. The design language of the map became very correlated to the physical property of the materials and means of reproduction. Thats one of the most important things that I think makes paper maps so magical. There an honest connection between the shapes the being shown, the ideas being presented, and the grain of the medium that it’s carried with.

This means we’re in a little bit of trouble with the internet, because the internet isn’t. Any of that that. There isn’t any hand, there isn’t any material, this is nothing there. What the itnentet is is completely foreign, is completely different, and you can see this in the early days of GIS. The ealtiu days of web mapping, there’s a lot of people trying o figure out what it means to make a map on the internet. And a lot of our shorthand tools were ported directly over from mapping via plotters. We took the tools that we had ands we put them onto a screen. And we made lot of super bad iughly maps. And that’s okay, that’s a growing process. Im sure the first woodcut maps were also super bad and ugly.

But throughout all of the spectrum of medium available to in main maps, I think there are three major pieces that we should be talking about and focusing on and these are the more compelling for us to move forward with into screens.

1. Seperation
2. Exageration
3. Simplification

We talked about simplicficatyion abobe, and it think it sone of the most important pieces. But separation is really important because your separating not only conceptually important from not important, Eco said that the ToDo list was the first defingin characterizing of humanity because it showed the cognitive ability to supernate important form not important, with paper maps and with printed maps this became a really important physical serpeateipm, because you can only do one color per plate or block or metric. That means you have to serpents out what you want to be related, and what you don’t want to map at all. This map is only showing a coupldof things, which is water: not water: streets mayeb: and buildings. \

What they’ve done is said ‘all of these orange things are related to each other and that’s what important.” SO all these are serpent out from everything that’s not orange. And this is maybe a simple idea, but I’ve seen so many maps on the web where we start with with really powerful base maps with opens trees maps, seri datasets, living atlas, which are incredible, but there this impulse to out everything in all together because we can, because its the internet. It can be as plastic and expand to fill as much ideas as we have in our head. But separating outa nd saying :water, not water, interesting, not interesting. Using design language to support that serrate is one of the major pieces that makes physical maps so good.

This is a map of exaggeration. I don’t think the landscape really looks like that. I don’t know if those are contour lines, even, this is a very old map maybe from before they even had contour lines, I don’t know. Hand drawn map from 1400. What They’ve done here is exaggerated the hills, and through this exaggerations — you see this with topographic maps all the time. Where if you had an actual relief map that was true and not exgergation it would be super super boring. And not useful on our main goal which is tor elate the felt ecpericne of the world to how we live in our bodies. So here we get a really good sense of what this landscape is probably like to be at;. We know there are steep rolling hill.s and and it very fdesnse, and wooded, and this gives us a very good feeling of how our body would be in this space, through h this eceetgaitong.

As for simplification, this is my favorite map of all time.

I have no idea what this map is or what this map is more, or what this map is going, or why this map. But its the simplest map I’ve ever seen in my life. It deoes one thing, and it does it very very well. It doesn’t need a baseman, it doesn’t need a roadmap, it doesbnt need poopptuos. It just is these things and here they are.

These are some tools that we can use to make maps good. And this is what we all want to do it make good maps, we want to make good internet maps, we awant to make good web maps, we want to make good printed maps. Good maps are really important to make.

What does that mean tho? What is good?

I think that goos is always relative to where you are, our what you’re trying to do. If we open that idea of good up a little bit, and we start talking about Good Things in the Expanded field Theres three axis I think are really important that we can work in:

1. Useful ⟷ Useless
2. Simple ⟷ Complicated
3. Ugly ⟷ Beautiful

Its not saying that “useful maps are bad” or “useless maps are good” but you have you understand where does your map fall on this spectrum of useful to useless. Like the gunpowder maps Im seeing around the hall – not super useful. But also good! You just hae to understand what your goal is int art spectrum, and makes sure that your decisions are hello you arrive there. Same with simple o complicateioed. The simple map is rally good as long as you’re using it simply. If your trying to navigate in Denmark, and your using that dot map, its actually a super bad ma[p! It depends where you want to be on the spectrum. Like ugly to beautiful. Ugly gets a bad rap and I want to defend ugly for second. Craigslist! Pretty ugly! Pretty good!

Its all about not saying “you need to be useful, and simple, and beautiful, and that’s the only way your going to make a good map!” You can make a useless complicated ugly map, and it would be good as long as that’s that map you are wanting to make.

This is data tho. This is not art. So I think maps have a fourth really important spectrum here, and that’s the space between:

4. True ⟷ Not True

Again, I don’t want to say “Not true maps are bad” but if your trying to be truthful, and your using your class breaks in away that hide the reality of your data, you’ve made a bad map. If your trying go over the top, and make point, you can elide the truth a little bit and make a good map.

Resources:…

Elsewhere