When learning about map design, I think it's really important for you to develop a critical eye. I want you to look at maps in a different way. Take a fresh look at them and think about what do you like about a map? What do you not like about a map? Is it confusing in some ways? Is there's something missing? Could you have done a better job, if it was yours to do? So what I'm going to do in this section is just talk about a map that's maybe not so great and then some things that can be done to improve it. So, this is a map I made myself. I'm very proud of this map, I think it's amazing looking, it's one of the best maps I've ever done and I'm hoping that you're already seeing from the weird expression on my face that I'm being sarcastic. So, yes, this is not the best map in the world. In fact, I've purposely made it a really lousy map because I want you to start to recognize things that can go wrong with a map. We're going to kind of critique it a little bit. Look at some of the things that may be wrong with it, I hope in your own mind you're kind of thinking I would have done this or you could have done that, and to try to encourage you to do this kind of critique. I should say at this point that you'll look at something like this and say "Oh, I would never make those kinds of mistakes." Believe me, I've seen these mistakes over and over again in all kinds of maps. It's really easy to kind of look at a map like this, in the abstract and sort of say, "Oh yeah, I know, I wouldn't have done that, I would have done that." But when you're making your map and you've been working on it for hours and you're stuck in the software and you're trying to figure out, how do I do this thing or you're up against a deadline. It's easy for these kind of mistakes to creep in. Anyway, I've said enough. Let's have a look at this and see if we can find, maybe one or two things that could be improved. Okay. So, let's have a look at this map and see if there's anything about it that we might be able to improve. I'll just kind of point out a few things, I'm sure you can find a few on your own. A very common thing to begin with, is that people use a really lousy title. If it's an assignment for a course for example, they'll just say, "Oh, well, it's Assignment 1. So, that should be the title." No. You should make the title something that's much more informative. Think about what you would do in a term paper or anything else that you're doing. The who, what, where, when, and why, as much of those things as you can fit in there. That doesn't mean that you have to put all of those in and every title and every map, but try to think of something a little more informative, that tells your reader where is this area. Don't assume that they know that this is, in this case, Toronto or wherever it happens to be. Maybe putting the date, that either the date that the map was created, or better, it would be the date that the data were collected, something like that. You might include a subtitle, things like that, and so let's look at some other things. The legend. All right. There's a there's a bunch of things I can talk about here. This is a thematic map. In other words, this is a map that only shows one main theme. It's not a reference map. So, there's really no need to put legend in here. There's only one thing in this legend. Okay. So, why put the title in there that says legend? You can just take that out or put in something a little more informative. That's one mistake. Another one is this heading here, which is ct_pop_2016, this is a very common mistake that people make when they're using GIS data and especially, if they haven't done this kind of stuff before, because that was the name of the feature class that I used to create this map. So, by default, the software will automatically use that name in the legend. So, what I would recommend that you do is change that to something more informative. So in this case, it could be census tracks or population 2016. There's lots of different ways you can do this. But whenever you see things like this, it's got lowercase letters, there's underscores, it makes no sense to hit somebody else, don't just leave it as the default, change it to something else. What about the color scheme for this legend and what you see on the map here? Okay. So, we've got these bright yellows, greens, purples, kind of an orangey-brown. So, what I'm hoping that you're getting from this is it's all too bright, too much contrast. The way I kind of think of this is that there's nothing in particular that you're meant to focus on. So, normally, in a map there would be one area that maybe that's darker than the rest or has higher contrast than the rest. When you have something like this, I always think of it like, if you're writing a text message to somebody in all caps or an email or something, that it's like you're yelling at them, you're kind of telling them look here, look over there, look at all of this, look at all. So, you don't want to do that, you want to use things that are more subtle and draw people's attention to one part of the map that you think is a particularly important part. Okay. So, bad color scheme. On top of that, you'll notice that the numbering system over here, in terms of the classes as we call them, the data classes, are sequential. So they go from 0 at the bottom and they go up to 82,434 at the top. So, we have five classes that are in a sequence, but the color scheme does not indicate a sequence. Like this kind of a color scheme, as bad as it is, might be more useful, say for something like land use. So, one area's commercial, one area's industrial, one area's residential, where there's no sequence to the dataset itself, then you can use colors like this to represent those classes. But when you do have a sequence, you want a color scheme, say from dark pink to light pink or dark blue to light blue or whatever color you are using to help people to see that these are a range of values. That's important. So this would be really confusing to somebody looking at that. While I'm on it, you'll notice that the borders of these areas, which we don't even know what they are, I'm only guessing, if I was to look at this that it says CT, so those would be census tracks. The borders of these census tracks are really thick, that it's really thick borders and it's too much. It kind of gives it this, I don't know kind of, play-school, primary school kind of feel to it, which makes your map almost look sort of clunky. When people see these kinds of things, they have less confidence in the map because they think, well, they didn't put a lot of time into this map, so maybe it's not that good, which may not be true at all. Maybe it's great data, but your people, you're kind of undermining the way people look at the map or the value of that they'll place in it. What else? We have this scale bar down here. So a bunch of things here. The fact that this scale bar is way too big for the map, it's oversized, so it's drawing attention to itself and really something like a scale bar is really meant to be something that you refer to when you need it, like, oh, how far is that? Oh, the scale bar's in the corner, great. You don't want it dominating the whole bottom side of the page here. So that's one thing. What else? We are using meters, which I have nothing against meters. I love the metric system, but when you use it for an area this size, you end up with these really large numbers, 28,800. Why not go with something like kilometers, so the numbers are smaller and just easier for people to relate to? On top of that, we should be using round numbers, so something like say 10 kilometers or 20 kilometers not 28,800, so try that. All you have to do is resize the scale bar until it goes to round numbers and then it'll just be easier for people to interpret. You might even go with the simpler scale bar, this is a little bit sort of elaborate for a simple map like this. I probably would go with something a little simpler. Some scale bars are really just a line with some ticks on it like that. That might be a more suitable for this map. Notice this north arrow is, one, it's really big, that's no good, so it should be smaller. Two, is that it's overlapping texts in the maps. We don't want that because then we can't read the text properly. Three, it's kind of elaborate. It's sort of a bit too ornate or decorative for a simple map like this which is meant to show population density which we don't even know that but I know that because I made it. This is not a pirate map, it's not a treasure map, sort of where did we bury our booty looty loot boot, whatever. So anyway, it's not like, here there be data, something like that. So go with something much simpler. This is just kind of hanging out there by itself. This is probably, there's nothing wrong with taking credit for your work, but it should be moved down here. What else? We've got this big empty space up here. That's no good, we really need to move this up, so that we have more balance in the map. So you're starting to see there's a lot of thought that goes into this. There's no neatline or frameline around this that you'd put around the whole map, so that kind of ties it all together. So I think you're starting to see, I hope that it's easy to make a lot of these mistakes. I'm not saying that you'll make all of them all the time, but if you're aware of them, if you kind of look at them in a context like this, it helps you to recognize them when you see them and to hopefully avoid making those kinds of mistakes yourself. Like I said, when you're looking at other people's maps, you're little more critical of them, and I mean that in a constructive way. It's not just that you're tearing them apart and being negative, it's that you're looking at it and going, "Oh, maybe they should have done this," or "I wonder why they made that choice." That's what I'm trying to get out here.
