Becoming a Map Critic

This week in Cartography, we had to pick two maps and offer critics - one poorly designed and one well designed. I jumped online and starting searching the depths of the internet to find some bad maps. I found the two maps below. I had a template of questions to answer about each. I had some immediate thoughts about each, but found that working through the questions gave me even more to say. 

This map was made by one of my favorite web comic authors, Drew, and while silly, is a great satire for beautifully designed visualizations that ultimate say not a lot.

At first, I wanted to use the Ohio map for my poorly designed map. But the more I criticked and studied it, the more I felt that, while silly, it was actually a pretty good map! This map, though heavily satirical, is actually very well-designed. Its objective is to satirize well-designed visualizations that actually provide no substantial information, and this comes across as very effective to me. Even if you don’t get this part of the joke, the map still provides some silly data that is well presented. The information displayed illustrates how far a state is from Ohio. While the legend gives this distance in silly slang, the meaning of the slang does resonant with the viewer as a way to think about distances. The simple visual design is not cluttered and provides just the right amount of information for the viewer, minimizing the “map crap” and only including what is necessary to understand the map. It does simplicity well. The map does not have any place labels but ultimately, doesn’t really need them. The main point is to show the distance from Ohio, which is clearly labeled in the legend. The author assumes the reader is familiar enough with the US to figure out which state is which. I really like the color choices. The color ramp illustrates the main point of the data (distance) in an intuitive manner (bright color = closer). The individual colors are different enough so it’s easy to tell the difference between them. The white outlines for the states work well with most colors, but they hard to see in the against the yellow. A different shade of yellow may have helped. The overall layout is nice, with the noncontiguous states filling in the page under the slant of the Southwest and the legend in the other corner. My biggest criticism has to do with how he’s coded some of the states. I would have placed Colorado and New Mexico into the “A ways” category based on the distance show and mapping patterns show on the map.

Symbol overload! The author definitely didn't follow the less is more philosophy, and is ultimately not able to convey much on this map.

After using the first map for my well-designed map, I knew this was meant for my poorly designed map critic. This map is trying to make a joke about alcohol consumption in the UK. However, it looks bad and ultimately contains a lot of misleading data. The overall style aesthetic is what I’d call “Basic Google Maps” and it’s not good. The author didn’t really make choices about the style as much as left the settings on default in Google. There isn’t an actual title and no other map elements were included. The author has taken minimizing the “map crap” a few steps too far. The layout has also cut off part of the data on the map. I would argue the map is basically telling lies, as it’s not really giving you true information about pubs in the UK. A better visualization choice would have been to create a heat map showing where pubs were most numerous. Knowing this would inevitably be around population centers, the best way to portray the information may be to calculate pubs per population. The map should include a legend to describe what is being visualized, as well as a title and appropriate labels to help focus the map.