How to Make a Beautiful Map

At least all of us have seen that beautiful map somewhere and wondered how to make it by your selves, well you have found the right place just relax and do the learning.

What I want you to have in mind is that map making is a skill that can be learnt and built. Remember that a skill is not taught in class. 

As an example I hope you know about Lionel Messi, a famous football player.

Lionel Messi in action

Of course it is evident that his coach gives him directions and training but him as the player, he puts in a lot of time in personal practice and perfection

So as a cartographer, surveyor, analyst, planner e.t.c you should always put in an extra effort to beautify and make your map presentable

Whenever you get a data set from somewhere, the first thing you should do is to explore and understand that data.

Gain an understanding of your data

This involves the history of the data, collection methods used, coordinate system used, error limits of the data, copyright policies, attribute data and their data types e.t.c.

Understanding the above will help determine the kinds of reprocessing methods to apply on your data. This is because different visualizations are used for ordinal, nominal, categorical and ratio data.

Nominal data values are values that provide a name or identify to differentiate different fields. No mathematical manipulations can be done on this data. An example is names of a county in a world country population data set.

Ordinal data values are values that can be put into a natural sequence but however do not allow any other computation on them. If we are representing GDP of the world’s country on a map, we can group them into high, low and average. However, this does not suggest that high is twice as average.

Interval data values are quantities, they allow computation and manipulation operations like addition and subtraction. However, this type of data has no arithmetic zero and does not support multiplication and division. For temperature, 0 degrees does not mean that there is no data value at that place. The value is simply a zero.

Ratio data values. The difference between this data and interval data is that it allows most of the mathematical manipulations and has an arithmetic zero. For example, distances can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided.

The time you put in the process also determines the final output. Maps that are continuously edited before publishing will look more neat.

Basic knowledge about colors is also a must have though ladies will probably find this easy to do and for the gents, because naturally they are good at color selection.  For example, consider a map where lakes are represented as blue to that where they are purple.

Map of Uganda with lakes represented in blue and roads in red

Once you possess that, the rest are the principals for creation of a beautiful map are those that are taught in class about data manipulation e.g. spatial interpolation, geo-processing, clipping e.t.c which are easy to apply.

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