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Mapmaking 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.

Section I describes a sequence of general problems that mapmakers often need to solve while creating an original map. These patterns are relatively abstract and connect to different parts of a workflow.

Section II (will) describe patterns for particular thematic elements depicted on maps. These patterns are more concrete and identify conventions or recurring solutions to map symbolization problems.

Section III (will) organize a set of examples for different types of maps that illustrate many of the patterns described in the book.

All together, the book 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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