
Map Design – a guide to good looking maps (2008) [pdf] - app4soft
https://orienteering.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Map-Design.pdf
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artie_effim
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.

~~~
app4soft
> _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.

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scanny
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...](https://www.esri.com/training/catalog/596e584bb826875993ba4ebf/cartography./)

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app4soft
> _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.

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app4soft
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/](https://www.openorienteering.org/apps/mapper/)

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

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MasterScrat
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...](https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps)

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zindlerb
I found the book Cartographic Relief Presentation
([https://esripress.esri.com/display/index.cfm?fuseaction=disp...](https://esripress.esri.com/display/index.cfm?fuseaction=display&websiteID=118&moduleID=0))
to be an in depth resource on this subject.

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app4soft
> _This book is no longer available from Esri._

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

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dagw
Not only is not free, it costs about €150

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

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app4soft
Can you provide link to free PDF-version of _«The Guide to Map Design» by Amy
Lee (Mapbox)_ ?

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gregsadetsky
[https://www.mapbox.com/resources/guide-to-map-design-
part-1a...](https://www.mapbox.com/resources/guide-to-map-design-part-1a.pdf)

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

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japanuspus
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.

