Styling your map – Guide to a successful map project part 5

Some clients have specific style ideas when they contact me and I enjoy bringing their ideas to life. It’s so satisfying when they tell me the map is exactly what they envisioned.

When you have specific design ideas or requirements

Some authors have an idea for a specific look (particularly for historic maps) and show me examples of maps they like, or they may want a map that matches their book’s colour scheme. They may even tell me what fonts they like.

Municipalities and tourism marketing organization clients share their brand guidelines which includes colours, list of requested fonts, logos, and imagery.

When the cartographer is free to develop design concepts

Other times clients don’t have specific ideas, so I ask them about the purpose of the map, what look and feel they want, who will read the map – everything we discussed in part of the guide. Then I develop two style ideas for them. I always tell them they can choose one style or the other, or select elements of both.

The examples below are for a tourist map of Alpena, Michigan. They told me they had no specific style ideas, so I came up with these two options and they chose the second one.

In the next newsletter we’ll start talking about map content and data sources.

Contact me

If you are ready to start your mapping project, contact me for a free consultation.

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