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cart patterns

Many years ago, I wrote a short handout called: “How will you know when you are done making your map?”

The handout aimed to provide a checklist for undergraduate students in cartography that could help them do two things:

  1. self-evaluate when they finished solving a map design problem;
  2. self-generate a to-do list while setting a map design problem.

This site aims to reproduce the old handout and build on it. At present, there are two parts to the project:

  1. PATTERNS describe a sequence of general problems that mapmakers often need to solve while creating an original map.
  2. EXAMPLES present a collection of maps that illustrate many of the patterns described in the book.

All together, this site aims to support two fundamental laws of mapmaking:

  1. A mapmaker must be able to articulate one or more reasons for every decision made on a map.
  2. ‘I just liked it’ should never be the only reason.

Please note: this is a work in progress that I am developing in Spring 2024.

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

Last update: 03/05/2024

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