All language subtitles for 11_visual-balance.en

Visual balance is important on a map.

If I show you a map like this which of
course has nothing on it just yet, but

if I put that on there you'll see that
there is not what we would call good

visual balance.

And that literary comes from this idea
of cutting out sheets of papers so

that you have you can see my hands here,

you're cutting out the shape of
say a country or continent and

you put them on different parts of the map
and that they actually weigh more.

If it's a bigger thing it has more weight,
there's more paper there.

If it's a smaller thing it has
less weight and so that kind of

language has been carried over into this
idea of visual weight is that if you have

something bigger and it's on one side of
the page, it actually makes the page tilt.

And it's not balanced properly and why
that matters is that your brain just kind

of sees that as something's off,
something's not quite right.

It doesn't have sort of
a pleasing overall look to it.

And so here we have something that's
not really well balanced visually.

What if I move that over there,
is that better?

>> No, not really.

How about there?

Hm no, it's still not good.

There?

No.

But that's good isn't it, okay.

So that's visually balanced because we
just have this basically one thing and

yes, we have an island as well but
generally we have sort of this one

feature, it's centered on the page and
that gives it better visual balance.

Although I have to point out,
it's not actually perfectly centered.

It's centered vertically, but
it's not centered horizontally.

It's actually slightly above the center.

And it's another kind of convention or
just a thing that's known about people

is that you tend to want to
look a little above center.

And so often when I'm making a map,

I don't just go with exact center for
something.

I might just move it up just a bit so

that it's centered just a little
above the center of the page.

It's not something you have to do.

I just point it out because it's sort of
one of those little factoids that got

stuck in my head a long time ago and
it seems to work well, is that if you

can start by aligning things horizontally
and vertically and then decide, based on

the shape of the object, and whatever else
is, do you need to nudge it a little bit?

If it was sort of an unusual shape,

maybe you would have to move it
a little to the left or to the right.

Just for
it to have that kind of visual balance.

Once you've placed your geographic
area on the map, you can then

place the other map elements around it
to try and maintain that visual balance.

So you might put the title
above the geographic area.

Maybe you put the legend below it.

You might have a locator map that shows
where in the world this thing is located.

So you might put that kind of
tucked in here, because Africa has

this sort of little indentation here,
maybe this is a good location for that.

But there's lots of different ways
that you can put this together.

These are three different combinations.

And they all have relatively
good visual balance,

there's not just one solution to this.

You could do it the way we have here,

where you have the title at the top,
the legend at the bottom.

That's kind of a typical convention.

But maybe you want to use the space
to the left of Africa, or

to the west of it, to use the legend.

Maybe you want to have a larger legend.

Maybe the locator map is smaller.

Or maybe you want the title to be at the
bottom, especially if it was a figure in

a book or something like that,
maybe that would make the most sense.

So there's more than one possible solution
in terms of establishing visual balance.

I want to give a little shout out here too
that I got this example from an ESRI blog,

so I have the url there if you
want to have a look at it.

Or you can find it on your own.

You just Google ESRI blog design
principles for cartography.

It's actually from 2011 so
it's a while ago,

but it's a really well-written
little blog post on visual balance.

I adapted it from there for this example,
so have a look at that if you want.