Cartographic Aesthetics

More please!

a detailed study of cartography enhances most jurisprudence.

A friend worked for a graphic design firm for a short time. She hated the job and people and set about fucking off on purpose to get fired or something (she had a good reason but I forget why.) She said she spent a lot of time net surfing, and when she worked on some maps, she inserted fake joke landmarks that were too tiny to be found. Those got printed and distributed.

Not strong on the layers of information, but I really like the artistic nature of it.

I dislike building being the pasty orange that they are on OS 1:25000 Maps. It makes them very difficult to spot in remote an hilly areas where the overall look of the map is pasty orange, due to access land, tight contours and the like. But then again black buildings may also not be clear due to intese rock detailing (not present on the above extract).

How much is national charater reflected in the style of 1:25000 maps. The fresh one is indellibly french but maybe because i have seen so many of them that it's an instant association. Or perhaps it is that the typefaces are many generations of Frech Road sign type face. They just seem very French to me?

I would say what the best map is depends on what's best for the users - i.e., generally speaking, the citizens of that country. The different national mapping organisations have different styles and emphasise/suppress/include/exclude different features because they are mapping a socially-constructed landscape. Europe is culturally diverse, so the topographic maps will be too.

To ask questions of aesthetics, we really need to get a mapping agency to map the same landscape in their own way and compare that. It's misleading to compare a map of a German city with that of undulating French countryside, for example, but it still brings out the differences. Aesthetics is also a social and cultural construction to some extent.

I'm looking at the role aesthetics plays in the new symbolisation of the Slovenian and Latvian landscape their countries' mapping since independence and integration in the EU. Aesthetics plays a huge role in cartographic design, but the subtle values within are a product of the cultures that create the maps. However, Imhof (Swiss) reminds us that the greatest clarity, power of expression, balance and simplicity are synonymous with beauty. 'Universal' principles therefore perhaps shape every cartographer's work.