cart patterns

How will you know when you are done making your map?

That was the title of a handout I wrote years ago for cartography students at Middlebury College. I designed it like a small booklet and gave each student a printed copy at the start of their first independent project. It served as a checklist of sorts to guide them through the unstructured task of making a map—on any theme, in any place, for any time and audience of their choosing—and to make all of these decisions independently.

The checklist showed the influence of those who had taught me over the years. The title echoed a question Waldo Tobler asked every graduate student at our proposal defense: “How will you know when you are done?” The structure drew from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and its core idea that good design solves a series of timeless conflicts confronting every designer in a domain. The purpose pointed to Donald Schön’s call, in The Reflective Practitioner, that design thinking involves knowing how to set up a problem as well as how to solve it.

Despite its intentions, the checklist didn’t land well with everyone. Perhaps overly sensitive, I listened to a few anonymous voices—on course response forms and public-facing websites—who found it stressful, excessive, tedious, or complicating. So after a few years, I stopped handing it out.

Then, a couple of years ago, a former student contacted me. They were in a job, faced with a graphic design task, and wrote to ask if I still had the handout—and if so, whether I could send them a copy. I dug it up, saw all the things I would now change, but sent it as it was. A few months later, a second student wrote with a similar request. When a third reached out, I realized there might still be value in the old project—and that it might be worth developing a version that could live online.

This site aims to revive the old handout and build on it. It’s a work in progress, something I tinker with whenever I teach cartography at Middlebury. It’s imperfect and incomplete, but perhaps it still holds value. It reflects my three core beliefs about mapmaking:

Everything on a map (and everything left off) reflects a decision by the mapmaker.
The mapmaker must be able to articulate one or more reasons for every decision.
“I just liked it” should never be the only reason.

Jeff Howarth
Associate Professor, Geography Department, Middlebury College, USA

Last update: 04/16/2025

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License.