First Week 3015 - Maps: Good and Bad

Have you ever wondered what qualities make a map good or bad? Here are two brief examples.

Example of a well-designed map.



The above map is an example of graphical excellence and meets the conditions of several Tufteisms from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The map is well designed and interesting to look at (1); the map is multivariate (4) in that it includes, colors, lines, numbers and names to identify the data; and the map contains clear, thorough and detailed labels that make this easy to understand (7).

2. Example of a poorly-designed map.



This is an example of a poorly designed map. It lacks graphical excellence in that it is not interesting (1); the information is not clearly communicated (2); the map has only one idea to communicate (3) and it does a poor job at that; and finally, the labeling of this map is terribly lacking(7).