About Cartography
Analogue Beginnings
My interest in maps was sparked early in my childhood by that world-renowned magazine, the National Geographic. My parents subscribed to it, but little did I know then that cartography would actually form a cornerstone to my career… along with the colour yellow!
My original training and education in cartography (80s) was rooted in analogue techniques; technical pens, rub-down transfers, tapes, scribing, film separations, etc. This was a time of craft, when production took weeks, not hours. You had to have a good grasp of cartographic theory, but without well developed practical techniques, you couldn’t progress.
There was a naturally stronger connection between mind and hand then, still understood as a vital skill in visual thinking today. You also had to be able to visualise the final map in your head as you didn’t have the luxury of screen-based experimentation that you are now afforded by modern technology. You also needed to understand how that map was constructed from film (colour) separations. In many ways, much more complex than today!
Digital Scepticism
I’ve always felt that having a strong grounding in analogue techniques has been foundational to successfully adopting and applying the emerging digital tools and techniques. An analogue education teaches you to better understand techniques and effects, generalisation and simplification.
We have access to some incredibly powerful tools these days. Across all fields, and not just cartography, these tools have ‘democratised’ practice so much — and AI will take this to yet new levels — that the total novice is able to create and produce watever they want. The upside to this is that new ideas enter the field, but at the same time we also get exposed to an equal amount of junk; maps that have fundamental presentation and communicative issues, or worse, present all forms of falsehoods and misinformation! We all have to navigate The downside to all technology is at least equivalent to its upside, something we all need to be aware of.
The computer science concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ (GIGO) is so applicable. A lack of understanding of map design, statistical analysis, communication design, map projections, and so on, can only result in poor and misdirected maps. We inhabit a world drowning in [ big ] data, so maps and other communication tools should be simpler and easier to digest and comprehend. Instead, we continue to design and develop numerous impenetrable design approaches and artistic endeavours that nobody really understands, but as they look nice, industry peers pat each other on the back to celebrate these so-called innovative steps.
“In a world where more maps are being made than ever before, cartography doesn’t need reinvention; it needs understanding!”
Digital tools are very enabling, but unless you gain the the underlying theoretical subject knowledge to use them, we end up with ‘the blind leading the blind’. Recognise if you are guilty of not knowing what you don’t know.
False Narratives
Maps are snapshots on the past, present and future — no doubt — but the current preoccupation with ‘narratives’ and the associated somewhat narcissistic trait of personal stories has infected the cartographic process. I don’t intend any dispassion in this respect, but find we discuss maps in terms of a narrative far too loosely and unhelpfully. It seems that everything we create these days has to have a narrative to be relevant. It’s symptomatic of the wider dumbing down in most fields. Unless something is short, highly animated and turned in to a ‘Janet and John’ style narrative, we are incapable of paying it any attention, or learning anything.
A single map does not contain a narrative in itself; it is a picture, an interpretation, a representation situated in one moment of time. We cannot infer a ‘story’ without a time component. We can only attribute a narrative to a map in its role as part of a wider context; a diachronic discussion. I feel we continuously confuse the synchronic and diachronic paradigms, and how we reveal them.
Stories (narratives) occur over time. Maps can only expose a narrative when time is a unit of its conception and measurement. Animated maps, or a series of static sequential maps on the same theme, can reveal a useful narrative, but not a map in itself. A ‘narrative’ was always the role of the atlas, a dying art in mapping that should be fully restored.
The Atlas
I’ve always felt this was the pinnacle of cartographic practice. In the past, very few homes were without one of these, however basic. However, it seems to have largely fallen out of favour as a product over the last few decades. In part, the digital world has removed some use cases, but I would argue, as a form, it’s probably more relevant now than it has ever been. In an age where we are preoccupied with narrative, the atlas is actually the ultimate story book.
The atlas was great at revealing both the detail and the big picture, whatever the theme(s). The collection of maps made it easy to compare and contrast states or continents, and the inter-relationships that existed. Time was also often a measurement factor of themes, dependent upon the nature of the atlas.
I recall a study trip to the Netherlands in the mid-80s where visits to local authorities felt like another space and time. They were modern, slick (drunk decent coffee!) and were big on strategic planning and joined up thinking. I was amazed at the publications (atlas-like) full of maps plotting a future for regions and life over decades — an approach so often missing here in the UK, which seems to operate on a crisis reaction basis only. We appear now to be incapable of strategic thinking and action in the UK.
GIS is Not Cartography
This is a common misunderstanding, even by those who use GIS everyday. GIS professionals work with geospatial data, so a ‘map’ is the usual visualisation method. However, filtering and redefining map features and values of existing datasets is not cartography, per se.
GIS has rudimentary drawing tools and it exists primarily to carry out spatial queries and analysis. The resultant map-based visualisations can be very [superficially] impressive, but they don’t neccesarily have embedded any established cartographic principles.
Sadly, cartography as a discipline has effectively been subsumed into the world of GIS. This field really only pays lip service to cartography, this, despite the fact that it is the older, more established, and more theoretically and academically grounded of the two disciplines; GIS is a cartographic tool, not the other way around. But, we live in age where technology rules, and GIS is a more popular subject.
Elements of Cartography
Recognised as a classic cartographic reference, Elements of Cartography (Robinson, et al., 1953). There have been at least seven further editions (revisions) since then. This was one of my core text books whilst at college. Even old (pre-digital) editions are worth tracking down as they are still an excellent introduction to cartographic first principles.
The book was one of the first to try and define five key conceptions (foci) in cartography:
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Geometric
: Mapping accuracy of reality; -
Technological
: Mapping efficiency and automation; -
Presentation
: Map design as core activity; -
Communication
: Information transformation and transmission; and -
Artistic
: Psychological and perceptual qualities.
These are still helpful distinctions to understand as part of any objective(s) in map commissions. It also indicative of the nature of cartography; both artistic and scientific. The cartographer is required to understand a broad range of theoretical and informational processes. Somewhat a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’, unless you specialise. As mentioned elsewhere, you need to have the ‘big picture’, but also know what you don’t know!
“Cartography is the language that speaks to all people, transcending borders and uniting us in our shared curiosity.”
Map Typologies
Apart from the conceptual foci of maps (above), you can also attempt to identify five core map typologies:
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Topographic
: Represent the natural and made-made world as it is (e.g. OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey maps); -
Topological
: Concerned with spatial relationships rather than geographic accuracy (e.g. London Underground map); -
Thematic
: Reveal (mostly) non-visible phenomena, data or activities (e.g. statistical maps, weather maps, geology maps, etc.); -
Artistic
: These are artistic impressions that have spatial significance (e.g. hand-drawn fantasy maps, painterly oblique aerial views, etc.); and -
Abstract
: This type may not have any significance other than being artistically interesting, and/or presenting a spatial attribute or pattern with non-standard techniques.
As with the previous section, the aim here is to reveal the range of maps and mapping, and how broad it is in both subject and practice.
Counter Cartographies
As a slight aside, but relevant to cartographic typologies, there is a form of cartography that sits just outside the norms and conventions in many respects; a tool in research and discovery. Mapping the unknown, the unseeable, the imaginary, the liminal, the hidden, the uncanny, the beyond, the elsewhere… the estranged! In these fields, cartography is used as one of many tools, the resultant ‘map’ often unknown; outputs determined and shaped by process.
I highlight the work of academic practitioners such as Mathew Emmett, with whom I collaborate with on research-focused projects through estranged_space. This is defined by the collaboration of Mathew and myself, expanding a transdisciplinary approach across architecture, art, cartography, multimedia performance and visual communication. The practice subjects spaces to closer examination, understanding and (re)interpretation.
A wide range of tools and techniques are deployed to explore the notions of perception, (re)interpretation, narrative, place and non-place, with particular experience in site-responsive interventions in spaces which are contested, unsettling, hidden, lost, peripheral or displaced. Applied learning and research is extended across a wider spatial practice that also concerns itself with the agency of mapping. The topologies of space, of real and yet imagined worlds — the near and the elsewhere — looking for narratives within spaces to amplify, re-present and re-frame them.
Arguably, you might say this work falls into the abstract map typology, but I make the distinction here as the ‘map’ (spatial representation) emerges through process rather than design.
The Way Through the Woods
With such a complex subject as cartography, and the wide range of tools available, it can be disabling to know where to begin and how to engage with the practice. First principles are important, but we live in age where it seems no-one bothers to understand their subject before embarking upon their journey, and finding a way through, so to speak.
I cannot reiterate enough how important it is to fully engage with cartography as a subject if you intend to create maps. You wouldn’t try and fix anything without a manual. I’ve stopped counting the articles I’ve read, and presentations I’ve attended, where the author/speaker talks about new approaches and/or innovative techniques that are, in fact, nothing more than a ‘reinvention of the wheel’. If they had done a bit of research in to their subject they would have realised we have been here before and in fact that innovation was already in existence, sometimes for a very long time! I’ve been in practice long enough to see things going full circle, more than once!
Another indication of a confusion with established disciplines, such as cartography, is the trend for (re)inventing itself in order to assert a new significance; geovisualisation, spatial information design, et al. However, all are firmly rooted in cartographic theory and practice. In one sense, they perhaps better reflect different times and ways of working where it seems disciplines must continuously morph and adapt to justify their existence.
Cartographic Affordance
A somewhat academic term, but ‘affordance’ is defined as the capabilities and potential uses that an entity or a process can offer, in this case, cartography. Framing the innumerable ways a creator or user can engage with a map(s), and how the communication process ebbs and flows is very difficult to define in a single and succinct statement. Maps and map-making afford enormous opportunities to affirm, direct, discover, represent, reveal, transport… and so much more.
Today, we have ready access to a plethora of enabling technologies, where the user needs no knowledge or understanding to create and produce. As such, the ‘mapscape’ reveals a lot of ignorance around the subject of cartography, and in some cases, even from main stream mapping providers. For example, a cartogram is a very distinct and well-known map type that has existed for 150 years, yet one leading provider of customised online mapping describes its map colouring schema as ‘cartogram’. Ignoring established cartographic knowledge and convention is simply stupid and causes confusion. Sadly, this is also proof that technologists lead the way, rather than subject experts. A problem that is both widespread and topical.
Transdisciplinary Practice
Undoubtedly, the enabling of technology and the availability of powerful creative tools, has injected a lot of new thinking in to the discipline of cartography. The plethora of research and publications from those in other disciplines, such as architecture, on the application of cartography in practice supports this resurgence. However, again, as noted earlier, sometimes this does no more than reinvent the wheel. For some reason, cartography, as a theoretical subject, is treated like an ancient and dead tradition needing to be reinvented and claimed by a more dominant discipline.
New disciplines and subjects, such as landscape urbanism, are claiming much of the ground once occupied by cartography, and redefining it. This is somewhat inevitable as transdisciplinary practice is becoming much more the norm; applying learning and experience across different disciplines to achieve noew outcomes.
Spatial Information Design
Cartography has always [ naturally ] been one of the purest forms of information design, though itself, a recently emerged discipline. Therefore, it’s a natural assumption to describe cartography as a form of ‘spatial information design’.
“Spatial information design is a multidisciplinary approach that combines data visualisation, GIS, and design principles to analyse, interpret, and represent spatial relationships and patterns in physical and virtual environments.”
This innovative field, newly emerged from the intersection of cartography, information design, and urban planning, evolved to address complex spatial challenges in contemporary society, though clearly extends beyond this. I now refer to my practice as spatial information design in order to fully capture my range of outputs. Whilst I have a strong position on the on the discipline of cartography, I also feel it helps to strengthen its significance and role in the current age. That said, I still call myself a cartographer… I just cannot let go!
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Updated: April 2026