Something Spatial

Creating maps is a unique challenge, and it’s all too easy to get lost in the numbers

Maps are curious things. They’re diagrams that show the relationship of places to other places. We use them all the time in a passive sense, but we rarely think of how we could make proper creative use of them in our work.

Import Mountain High Maps Plus maps into Adobe Illustrator and you can extrude them for a 3D look

Most of the time the place-to-place rela­tionship that a map shows is physical, a spatially accurate representation of distance; sometimes it is logical but not strictly physical, something that shows how one place links to another. The maps of the London Underground network and practically every metro network in every major city are great examples of this. It wasn’t always like this. Just over a year ago we looked at info graphics and Harry Beck’s 1933 under­ground map design revolution (MacUser, 13 May 2011, p80) The transport maps that had been used up to that year were geographically accurate, in that stations and lines were drawn as they really existed in a regular map: meandering from sta­tion to station, cramped in the city center and spread out in the suburbs, and soon. As Beck found, in the case of this kind of map requirement, some abstraction and regular rising of the map data is very important to get the right message across. It may lead to the occasional misunderstanding of how near some stations actually are to each other (tourists often take tube journeys that would be twice as quick by foot), but it’s a masterful example of simplifying the representation of com­plex route maps. In other words, making the map more directly useful by making it less strictly accurate.

When incorporating maps into your own design work, whether you’re abstracting things or going totally literal, the big problem is getting core map graphics that you know are accurate and aren’t going to bite you in the backside when it comes to copyright. Many years ago, I made a tutorial that showed techniques for drawing and merging paral­lel paths to create custom road maps. Foolishly, I included part of a scan of a printed map as the starting point example. Copyright whoops! It was settled ami­cably, but it was a mistake I’ve been careful to avoid since then. Don’t use map graphics without knowing that you’re entitled to do so. How? It isn’t as difficult as you may think.

Photoshop 3D

I’ve been experiment­ing with mapping (no pun intended) lists of different groups of people - longboard ‘crews’ in this case - into visual maps of Europe and beyond, and also plotting the places a friend has been going in search of skate manufacturers. I’ve been using something that may tickle your memory if you’ve been a Mac user for long enough - Mountain High Maps Plus, one of the early CD media products, from mhmplus.com. I hadn’t realised until recently that it’s still around and is kept bang up to date. Its EPS vector country maps are ideal for this experimental project: once you’ve bought the collection, there’s no concern about copyright problems. Equally impor­tantly for customising things, it also gives total layered vector control. There are various bitmap options, too, even Photoshop 3D globes, but the EPS files are perfect for my plans: open one in Illustrator and I get a few dozen different layers, each with different map element types. I turn off the ones I don’t need and play with the ones I do.

One of the big issues with maps is that borders do change, so watch out for showing stuff that’s out of date. I’ve been assured that the Mountain High graphics are kept up to speed. The latest downloads include the recent North and South Sudan changes, any disputed boundaries are shown in different color paths, and graphics for imminent changes - Vojvodina’s possible bid for independence, say - are held in waiting. This sounds like an exacting process that must make the developers dread border conflicts!

Geographically  accurate maps (right) can show different data by distorting the physical features (far righ)

More generally, maps in vector graphic form are what allow one of the more off-the- wall uses of geographically accurate maps: distortion of physical features to show dif­ferent data. In other words, cartograms. Population growth levels, concentration of down­hill race champions by country, voting trends - whatever you want to present. As long as you have the data, some patience and the right addi­tional software, you can turn out distorted-map infograph­ics. At least in theory; I have to admit I’m finding it an ‘interest­ing challenge’.

This is the territory of data nerds, and the tools are gener­ally pretty spartan. ScapeToad is a clever tool that’s specifically for representing custom data in cartographic map forms. Throw the right data at it and you’ll get a precisely manipulated map. But when I say ‘clever’, I also mean ‘thoroughly opaque’. The ScapeToad site (scape toad. choros.ch) says the numbers that are to be used to modify the vector maps must be stored in a .shp ‘shapefile’ document, which seems to be a standard format in this field. Creating one isn’t covered, although you can jump directly to a techni­cal PDF that talks about the byte-level construction of the format. Ouch.

MAPresso looks a bit more usable by comparison, but it requires Java and has to run within a browser window. Use the online version at mapresso.com/quickstart/tool rather than downloading and running it on your own Mac, as this method provides a selection of ready-to-morph maps to choose from and a simple way to paste in your own number data.

Curiously, both ScapeToad and MAPresso have a decid­edly Swiss slant. Detailed Swiss canton maps can be generated from the demos, but if you want much of elsewhere, you’ll need to supply your own and get into the whole deep manipu­lation of data thing. And that’s even before you think about formatting the numbers used to reconfigure the graphics.

As well as EPS vector maps, Mountain High Maps offers bitmap options such as Photoshop 3D globes

One amusing example of MAPresso output is the Heavy Metal Cartogram, published at bit.ly/heavymetalcartogram. This shows the countries of the world distorted according to the number of heavy metal bands they have, according to the Encyclopedia Metallum at metal-archives.com. It’s also a good example of the prob­lems of inaccurate data and the simplicity of the MAPresso tool; Alaska is pumped up to be larger than the rest of the US states through a graphic quirk rather than having many more heavy metal bands.

It’s all deeply clever stuff, but for any designer looking for a visual solution to a crea­tive challenge, the various applications are simply too complex as they stand. It looks like this is something I’m going to have to keep chipping away at if I’m ever going to really understand how to control custom map deformation processes. Until then, I’ll stick with editing the Mountain High Maps EPS graphics in Illustrator. There, I can play with color to represent different data, and I can extrude to different heights if I want a more 3D appearance. I think it should cover the vast majority of my graphic design mapping needs. And I can sleep at night with no worries of falling foul of map copyright issues.