4 replies to this topic

[gvlisnas]

So here is my series of thematic maps for a course in the Rural and Survey Enginnering School at the National Polytechnic University in Athens,Greece.

We had to do 8 maps, each one about something else.
1st) A map about the arrangement of various services in the historical centre of Athens (police stations, electrical company, banks etc.)
2nd)A map about the population in each of the prefectures of Greece
3rd)A map about the ...erm don't know the english word ....is the population of Greeks tha returned to Greece from their countries.
4th) A map about the dynamic of population of each greek prefecture with a contour map and a 3d surface one.
5th A map about the dynamic of population of each greek prefecture
6th)A map about the mean dynamic of population of each prefecture using 3d surfaces from Autocad. The elavation of each prefecture is the dynamic.
7th) A map about the population of the prefectures divided in categoriesQ people tha live in cities, small cities, country.
8th A map about the difference of population in each prefecture from 1991 to 2001. We had to find how to present this.

The base maps were given in Corel files and Excel sheets. Actually we were advised to use Corel (!), Autocad and Surfer for the 4th map.
I couldn't use Corel (its awfull) so in overall i used Arcgis, Autocad, Surfer, Photoshop, and ofcourse Illustrator. The first 2 were done in Arcgis and the others in Illustrator/Arcgis. I didn't want to find a pattern and do all of them likewise so i tried to be creative. I know that they're more graphic design than cartography but all the rules that apply to cartography were used. Furthermore anyone who is familiar with the designers republic will notice that in 2 of them i was fully influenced (or copied ).

We had to deliver them in .pdf files and the size had to be A4.

As you see i generally give a lot of attention to the margin (?) of the map because i see it as a whole.
I would like to read some comments, although i know the maps are difficult to read because they are in Greek. But you can get some kind of idea.

Thanks for your attention


p.s. .pdf versions available

[Hans van der Maarel]

As you see i generally give a lot of attention to the margin (?) of the map because i see it as a whole.
I would like to read some comments, although i know the maps are difficult to read because they are in Greek. But you can get some kind of idea.

I'm going to try to say something about each of them.

Overall, I think the design is pretty good and I like the fact you tried to make them all look unique (however, since 2-8 share the main theme 'population', I think a series would have been justified too).

• Maybe add some street names? That would help map readers to orient themselves.
• I think the water pattern is distracting a bit. Maybe you can tone it down a bit (or remove it alltogether)
• I think the word you're looking for is 'remigrants'. Is there a specific difference between the red and blue arrows? There doesn't seem to be a lot difference in width between them. Obviously I don't speak Greek, so I can't read the legend and find out...
• Nice! I would have tried a different color ramp though, this one is a bit all over the place.
• Hmmm, the overal design reminds me of my high school math textbooks
• Diagrams like this aren't always easy to read. What's behind Athens? Maybe you can pick a higher viewpoint, use the colors from #5 for the prefectures and try adding some shadow effects. I think that'll improve the overall legibility.
• Nice way to solve the overlap problems, but why the index grid?
• I would have had the colors break at the 0% point here. Now you have a 1 logical color ramps, yellow-orange-red, going across the 0% level. I would recommend making the 0-7% class green as well.

[gvlisnas]

Overall, I think the design is pretty good and I like the fact you tried to make them all look unique (however, since 2-8 share the main theme 'population', I think a series would have been justified too).

• Maybe add some street names? That would help map readers to orient themselves.
• I think the water pattern is distracting a bit. Maybe you can tone it down a bit (or remove it alltogether)
• I think the word you're looking for is 'remigrants'. Is there a specific difference between the red and blue arrows? There doesn't seem to be a lot difference in width between them. Obviously I don't speak Greek, so I can't read the legend and find out...
• Nice! I would have tried a different color ramp though, this one is a bit all over the place.
• Hmmm, the overal design reminds me of my high school math textbooks
• Diagrams like this aren't always easy to read. What's behind Athens? Maybe you can pick a higher viewpoint, use the colors from #5 for the prefectures and try adding some shadow effects. I think that'll improve the overall legibility.
• Nice way to solve the overlap problems, but why the index grid?
• I would have had the colors break at the 0% point here. Now you have a 1 logical color ramps, yellow-orange-red, going across the 0% level. I would recommend making the 0-7% class green as well.

thank you for your comments!

1. I too thought about adding street names. The base map didn't have any, and in the guidelines for the map they stated that we didn't have to. Of course in a commercial map i would put the street, park and square names.
2. Yeah i think you're right. That map was done in arcgis and it doesn't have a lot of capabilities in cartography. When i added that pattern it gave me the illusion that the mainland stand further up than the sea, like a 3d illusion. I don't llike this map very much.
3. Yes the red arrows are for women and the blue for men. The challenge here was to find the group that contain both men and women from a specific country or region. The instructions stated that both men and women from the same country/region should be in the same group. Countries are with a yellow outline and outer glow and regions (rest of the continent) with a greenish outer glow.
4. You're right about the color ramp. But the thing is that all the colors are used only in Athens that stands out. Furthermore the red/brown ones at the bottom of the color ramp make the specific areas look like holes. A one color, color ramp would be correct.
5. . The idea here was that i wanted to use some kind of a pattern and furthermore i didn't want the neighbouring countries to be like standalone entities (does that make sense?) but to unify them with the margin of the map. Just like in the last map. The map is a bit too much i admit that.
6. Yes there aren't easy to read. Actually i don't like them too much because you don't get a good sense of the scale and if you have 1 or 2 regions that are higher than the others, you get serious overlaping problems. This was done in autocad and i couldn't find any outline or transparency effects for Athens (and Thessaloniki-in the north). I tried a lot of angles and that was the only one that you could see "Evia-another prefecture" behind athens and still get a sense of the small difference between other neigbouring prefectures in the North.
7. The index grid is like a cartesian coordinate grid. I needed something to fill with the sea. Didn't want to use any other colors besides green and grey so i added this that continues over the legend...just for design purposes.
8. Yeah you're right about that....Red for negative% and green for positive%. This color ramp i used just points out that the orange-yellowish % are small amounts. But now i think that your point makes more sense.

Thank you!

[DaveB]

Some quick comments:
1. The map seems a bit crowded to me; it might help if you toned down the scale bar from black to the same blue you used for the grid and north arrow.
2. not crazy about the pattern for the ocean (says "frozen" to me )
3. flow arrows look great! (although I'm wondering about B2, does the separation of the flow arrows mean the males and females are coming from different places?
4. not crazy about the color ramp
5. the figure-ground here is odd to me; the black recedes, putting the seas and Greece at a similar level in the visual hierarchy above the other lands
6. not much to say about this one
7. seems kind of odd that only the 2 big pie charts are transparent; I think a graticule would be more appropriate than an index grid
8. this one hurts my eyes with the dot fill and the numerous bright colors

Overall I would say lots of good work. Trying out various designs is good. If you were to continue with this you could then narrow it down to a smaller number of designs for a coherent series of maps such as for a population atlas.

[gvlisnas]

Some quick comments:
1. The map seems a bit crowded to me; it might help if you toned down the scale bar from black to the same blue you used for the grid and north arrow.
2. not crazy about the pattern for the ocean (says "frozen" to me )
3. flow arrows look great! (although I'm wondering about B2, does the separation of the flow arrows mean the males and females are coming from different places?
4. not crazy about the color ramp
5. the figure-ground here is odd to me; the black recedes, putting the seas and Greece at a similar level in the visual hierarchy above the other lands
6. not much to say about this one
7. seems kind of odd that only the 2 big pie charts are transparent; I think a graticule would be more appropriate than an index grid
8. this one hurts my eyes with the dot fill and the numerous bright colors

Overall I would say lots of good work. Trying out various designs is good. If you were to continue with this you could then narrow it down to a smaller number of designs for a coherent series of maps such as for a population atlas.

Thank you for your time to comment, really appreciate it.

1. Yeah i like that idea with the scale bar. I do prefer generally to use less colors in the map like the 7th one.
2. I don't like the pattern either
3. B2 stands for "rest of Europe" The thing is that i couldn't put them in B1. I had to use only 0, 45 and 90 degrees angles so there wasn't any space around Greece left. So i thought make B1 about the specific countries and B2 the rest of the continent. And i thought that if i had the beginning of the 2 arrows from the same place, someone would think that it was a country, which is not.
4. Its not correct i know...should have been shades of one color.
5. Yep, that was my intention (if i understanded you correctly). I didn't want this map to have any geographic info besides Greece. This is why although the coastline of Turkey, Albania and Bulgaria is correct, they kind of morph into the margin of the map. Don't forget, it is a thematic map and you have more liberties in making it than making a topographic one for example.
7. Thats because they're the only 2 pies that are big and they overlap the neighbouring ones and a big areas of the geography of greece. I could either make them transparent ot just use their outline. The index grid was just used for design purposes. I didn't have any info about longtitudes and latitudes to create a graticule. Tha base map was simply a corel file.
8. Point taken