Map Design – a guide to good looking maps (2008) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Map Design – a guide to good looking maps (2008) [pdf]

orienteering.asn.au

110 pointsapp4soft15 comments

HA! My wife is a cartographer (for the past 15 years) and it is a dying career. Her company is in its death knells and there is little hope of getting a design job these days, it's all GIS and barely any artistic design work nowadays. This is all nice to know, but there won't be but a few cartographers in 20 years.

> but there won't be but a few cartographers in 20 years

Yeah, processing LiDAR, GPS-tracks and other sort of GeoData using GIS in our days is very handy and mostly decreased needs in "old-school" cartographers.

But, in the future "old-school" cartography would be some sort of art, such as B&W film photography now.

Also, painting using pencil & paper still popular by artists and now old technique mostly combined with draw in image editors, but last not fully replace pencil & paper. So, I'm not sure that now there are only 20 artist who use pencil & paper around the world.

Number of such professional artist really decreased in last 20 years, but PC and mobile image editors give chance to draw art for many users, that not paint before or lack experience with pencil & paper.

Thanks for posting, I really enjoyed reading that. I have found personally I enjoy the more interactive learning more engaging. There are some pretty nifty online carto-courses floating around.

I know Esri runs a free one every now and then, it would be interesting to see how much of the teachings from different sources align with one another. Maybe once day there can be an open standard for cartography! https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/596e584bb826875993ba4e...

> There are some pretty nifty online carto-courses... by Esri

And you can't do nothing with it in offline.

PDF book is much better, as it fully acceptable without Internet. And downloaded book not require any registrations.

TL;DR: This guide written by Brian Mee (member of British Orienteering Federation) originally for design printed orienteering maps, but would be useful for creators of any type of maps.

FTR, I would recommend to try OpenOrienteering Mapper[0] app (desktop publishing software for cartography) if you need free & open-source tool for draw orienteering maps (or other types of vector+raster maps) and prepare it for printing or export it in many different raster and vector formats (powered by GDAL lib), including PDF with CMYK or Spot color separation.

Mapper sources available on GitHub[1] and binary builds provided for Linux, Mac OS, Windows and Android (including Android-x86).

[0] https://www.openorienteering.org/apps/mapper/

[1] https://github.com/openorienteering/mapper

If you enjoy reading about map design, I highly recommend this article:

"A YEAR OF GOOGLE & APPLE MAPS - How much do Google & Apple Maps change in a year?" https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-appl...

I found the book Cartographic Relief Presentation (https://esripress.esri.com/display/index.cfm?fuseaction=disp...) to be an in depth resource on this subject.

> This book is no longer available from Esri.

Also, this book is not free and not available as PDF.

Not only is not free, it costs about €150

After a bit of searching, I found it hosted on the Internet Archive [0]. Thanks for the reference!

[0] https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.131735/

BTW, for digital cartography, I highly recommend The Guide to Map Design by Amy Lee (Mapbox): https://www.mapbox.com/map-design/

Can you provide link to free PDF-version of «The Guide to Map Design» by Amy Lee (Mapbox) ?

https://www.mapbox.com/resources/guide-to-map-design-part-1a...

Why do they think they need arrows on the (north?) ends of all the longitude(?) lines? Surely one is enough?

This guide is intended for orienteering maps. When using them you will usually be running with the map folded up so it is only partially visible.

A much recommended activity by the way. Your local orienteering club will probably have open runs every weekend where everyone can just show up.

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