Brewer - Designing better maps: a guide for GIS users

A Guide for GIS Users

SECOND EDITION

Cynthia A. Brewer

Esri Press, 380 New York Street, Redlands, California 92373-8100
Copyright 2016 Esri
All rights reserved. 1st edition 2005; 2nd edition 2016.

Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 161 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Brewer, Cynthia A., 1960

Designing better maps : a guide for GIS users / Cynthia A. Brewer. -- Second edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-58948-440-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-58948-437-5 (electronic) 1. Cartography. 2. Geographic information systems. I. Title.

GA105.3.B74 2016

526.0285--dc23

2015021163

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It has been ten years since I wrote the first edition of Designing Better Maps, so it has been a curious adventure to revisit the content in detail. Each fall, I rework much of this content when I teach introductory cartography at The Pennsylvania State University, so a good proportion of it remains familiar and useful for explaining how to design maps using geographic information system (GIS) software. My experiences over the past decade have changed the proportions in my teaching emphases.

I teach less on color now. That is surprising because it was the primary emphasis in my research for many years. ColorBrewer has become so well established in GIS use that it is now built into Esris ArcGIS Pro application. Open-source programmers have built the color schemes into their own tools, such as R (a spreadsheet of RGB [red, green, and blue] color schemes is online to ease this adoption).

I teach more on topographic mapping, partly because I have learned more about this challenge after years of working on research grants with the US Geological Survey (USGS) and participating in a 2007 National Research Council committee to envision the USGS Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS). Through these projects, I have learned the importance of automating labeling and symbol design settings for mapping an entire city, watershed, or even the entire country in all its variety from one set of related decisions implemented with GIS tools. I teach less now on how to handcraft the single map display or atlas map series, though the map design principles are the same.

Through the research with USGS-CEGIS, I have also learned about how GIS data can be better structured to support automated cartographic design. The research groups I have been part of have been working on topographic mapping through scale, and we are all now used to online tools that offer views at a series of scale levels. One key for mapping through scale is to have an importance attribute for features. This importance attribute should provide sufficient levels to produce a hierarchy of representations. Importance levels allow size and lightness ranges among symbols for a feature class. Importance levels also allow variation in label size, style, and color. Most importantly, the importance attribute allows map designers to systematically and selectively remove content for smaller-scale views.

Because mapmakers often do not have datasets on each theme repeatedly compiled at multiple scales, the challenge of multiscale mapping is to pull together data from multiple sources, with varied levels of detail and precision. Thus, I have included a new chapter in this edition that organizes many feature types for reference mapping and basemaps.