Looking to see
Creative notebook
You may find inspiration at any time or place—not just when you’re sitting down to work. If you only think about your creative work while you’re actively doing it, you may often find yourself stuck or out of fresh ideas.
Always be on the hunt for visual ideas. Take pictures of colors, textures, patterns, and other striking visuals when you see them. When a map inspires you, take a photo and annotate what you like about it. Spend a few minutes each day sketching something someone else has made. Look for visual analogs—things similar to what you want to create, which you can use as models for your own work. Collect these impressions in a notebook. It can be analog, digital, or a hybrid.
Start each entry with the date. For any image, include a brief description of what caught your attention—how it made you feel, what it made you think about, or why you liked it.
Forensic style sheets
For practice, use a good map as a base layer and create a style sheet by redrawing the lettering, symbols, palette, and underlying grid or organizational scheme at scale.
When you visit a major art museum, you may see easels in the corners—or a student using one to study a painting. These students don’t just admire the art; they learn by trying to recreate it.
National Gallery of Art, May 2015
Get in the habit of looking at maps and asking: “How did they make that? How could I make that?”
Try to find digital copies of maps at scale (original size) that you can use as base layers. Sample different elements and redraw specimens—lettering, symbols, and the grid or organizing logic. It may feel like copying, but if you’re actively engaged, it becomes something else entirely: detective work. You’re searching for rules of thumb used by masters—solutions to recurring design problems. How did they make decisions? What makes their choices work? What alternatives might succeed for similar—or entirely different—reasons?
Annotate technical details on your sheet. What’s the smallest type size, line weight, or symbol? What’s the largest? What are the steps between?
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