Original subtitles

When designing a map, typography is really important.

It's a way of being able to show similarities, differences and

relationships between different types of geographic features.

Let's have a look at that.

I'm just going to go through some of the basics of typography.

I don't claim to be a total expert on it,

but I feel like there's some really simple guidelines that anyone can

use to really help improve the effectiveness of their map.

So we'll just want to start from simple things.

Just something like changing or choosing lowercase text,

uppercase text, title case, or

sentence case tells people something about the information on your map.

Remember, similarities, differences, relationships.

And so is not just those similarities, differences, and relationships,

it's that you're talking about the visual hierarchy or the importance of things.

If you have something that's in small, lowercase letters versus something that's

in large, capital letters, that tells somebody that the large capital letter

thing, whatever that is, is more important visually, and probably geographically or

in the real world, as opposed to that thing that's got smaller text.

Another simple decision that can be made about typography is whether you decide

to use serif or sans serif for any particular geographic type of feature.

And what do I mean by that?

Serif just means that it has these little flourishes on the parts of the letter.

You may have seen this before or maybe you know this already, but

I think it's worth pointing out.

Is that a serif font was actually originally designed so

that it made it easier to read text across a page.

And so the little flurishes are meant to kind of

provide a guide as your eye reads accross.

Sans serif became more popular later, and it does not have those little flourishes.

So depending on what you're mapping, you may want to choose one versus the other.

But remember, you want to be able to use them to show similarities, differences,

and relationships.

So if you want to show, say, natural features versus ones made by humans, maybe

you make one set of labels in serif fonts and the other one in sans serif font.

And you'll see this kind of thing a lot,

because it's a way of conveying that kind of information.

So you can also use, so we can use whether it's uppercase, lowercase, serif,

sans serif, the size of it, different typefaces, the color.

All of these things are used to efficiently communicate to somebody

what's going on on the map.

What we usually refer to as a font, and I'm just as guilty of this as anyone, but

I'm trying to use the correct terminology here,

is actually referred to as a typeface.

So Calibri, which is the one I'm using here,

is actually technically called a typeface.

So then we have the type style, so that could be normal.

And then the size of it is called the type size, and that is usually done in points.

So here we have the Calibri typeface in the normal style at a size of 24 points.

And together that is referred to referred to as a font.

That's something that comes from old typesetting days, is that they would

actually have collections of blocks that they would put in a printing press.

And so together, this was referred to as a font, it was a collection of those,

that was particular typeface and style and size.

So a different font would be, it could still be Calibri, could still be normal,

but if it's a different size,

technically that would actually be referred to as a different font.

And so the same thing for Calibri Italic, Calibri Bold.

So even though the sizes are the same, now the style is different, and so

these are all part of the same typeface.

But they're considered to be different fonts, just so you know.

Here we have different typefaces, so Arial, Calibri, Bookman, and Cambria,

there's tons of them out there.

They come in different styles, typically Normal, Bold, and Italic.

And then we can have different type sizes, so whatever it is, here we've got 18, 24,

and 32.

So I'm hoping that you are familiar with a lot of this already.

But I want you to kind of think about how this relates to map design in particular.

There are preferred locations on a map for labels, say, for

something as simple as just a dot that's representing, say, the name of a town.

So the best location is above and to the right.

Here.

The second best is below and to the right.

The third is above and to the left.

Below is fourth, above is fifth, and sixth is at the bottom of it.

And so you may not always have a choice about this, but sometimes you do.

Obviously you try for the best location first, but

maybe there's something that's blocking that or that would overlap with the text.

It could be a rail line or a building or whatever.

So then you try to go for the second one and see if that fits.

And if that doesn't fit, then you go to the third one.

And this all has to do just with where people's eyes are trained to look for

things.

And for whatever reason, our brains want to look above and to the right for

a label.

And if you can put it there, that's going to be most efficient.

And if not, then the brain will look at the next location and the next one.

So this is just a good guideline to go by.

Sometimes you can have the software label things automatically for you.

Or you can set it to have different waitings, so that it'll try this first and

then try a different position second.

And you don't necessarily always have to have this kind of minute

attention to detail.

But if you can, it will always make for a better designed map.

I'm always curious about the typography decisions that map designers make.

And web maps are a good way to kind of quickly get a sense of what's going on or

what they chose to do.

And so if you're learning about this stuff or applying it for the first time,

it's always a good idea to go look at other people's maps,

especially professionals, and see what they did.

And then see if you may want to follow the same kinds of conventions that they did.

So here we have Esri's basemap.

This is their topographic basemap.

And you can see, for example, that they're using uppercase for

the names of the states, and that's actually a serif font.

They're using uppercase for the names of mountain ranges,

but it's a sans serif font.

And maybe the design decision that they made was that states are man made

features, if you want, or human features, or things related to people.

Versus something like a mountain range which is a natural feature.

So we've also used the same convention for the names of countries.

You'll notice that they've used a serif font for natural features.

But it's now italic and it's in a different color, so that it is clear to us

that these are referring to a different class of geographic feature.

And then we have sans serif used for the names of cities and

towns in various parts.

With a different basemap, this is a terrain map, they've got a different set

of design decisions that were made about the typography.

So here we still have capital letters with a serif font for states, but

they've made it a different color so that it doesn't stand out as much.

In this one, though, the cities and towns are in a serif font,

as opposed to the last one, which was sans serif.

And the mountain ranges, you can just see part of it here is capital serif, but

it's in italics.

This is a different basemap, this was done by National Geographic and

is included in Esri's basemap series.

These are different design decisions again in relation to topography.

So here you can see that they've used a similar idea with the labeling of states.

But now the mountain ranges are using a serif font and are more obvious, but

they're still in italics.

It's interesting that they've curved this one here, where here this one's straight.

They're using sans serif for the names of towns.

You see that the larger cities have larger text, smaller cities or

towns have smaller text, to sort of indicate that visual hierarchy.

And then OpenStreetMap made a very different decision as well,

partially in terms of the content as well as the style.

You'll notice there's much less labeling on here.

And then in terms of what they have used for typography,

there's different decisions again.

I'm not going to go through every one of these in a lot of detail, but again,

just try to think about it like, what would you do?

Which of these do you like?

Which style might you use for your own maps, and

how would you use them to indicate things that are similar to each other or

different, or what the relationships are in terms of size or something else?