Compilation

Simplify the world

The real world is complicated and this complicatedness creates visual noise. Anything that’s on a map that doesn’t need to be there is just going to distract the reader or compromise the clarity of a map.

Select only those aspects of the world that are necessary to support the purpose of the map and fulfill the needs of your map user. Ask yourself these questions:

Do you show appropriate (not excessive detail) of area and line features for your geographic scale?
Have you selected reference features to support allocentric referencing (location of one feature with respect to another feature) without making the background too visually noisy?
Is there anything on your map that attracts attention without contributing to the purpose of the map?

Reference features

People think about space more in relative than in absolute terms. It often feels more intuitive to think about the location, size and distance of something relative to something else, rather than the exact x,y,z location of something.

Do you have some features on the map that help people locate the things that you are trying to emphasize (to help them understand where features are in your geographic region)? Have you supplied just enough of these features to serve as references without cluttering your map?

Clarify relative locations of map features, even if this requires you to alter the absolute location of features. For example, it a road follows a river, make sure the road does not appear to touch or overlap the river due to the scale of your map and the precision of your line data.

Map scale and extent

Did you consider how the size of your region of interest, the amount of paper or monitor screen you have to work with, and your purpose for selecting and styling map elements influence your choice of scale? Did you make the scale (or representational fraction) a round number and something that easliy scales for measurement or reasoning about distance? (For example, on 1:62,500 scale, 1 inch equals 1 mile).

Map projection

What projection did you use and why did you decide to use it? This question largely pertains to smaller-scale maps (large area, small map) where your map will necessarily distort some qualities of space due to the projection that you choose. Consider the needs of your map reader: will they need to infer or compare the area, shape, distance, direction of features on your map? If so, what projection would help them do this?

Separable part

Many people don’t read every word in a paper or article, but few people will skip looking at a nice graphic or figure.

Put all information on the map that the reader must know to understand your map. Don’t make a map dependent on reading the narrative text that it is embedded in.