It’s a beautifully organised piece of work.We shouldn’t be afraid to make maps that use strong visual metaphors. The traditional shape of the outlines of projected countries gives way to a more powerful aesthetic. Text is fairly limited but a nice touch is the linking of the countries labelled in list form with the symbols of the circles themselves. The left foot shows us totals and the right foot reorganises the data per capita so we get two feet, each of which shows us a different aspect. International comparison comes through exploring the different sized symbols and their labels.Ĭertainly this is at the heavily stylized end of the cartographic spectrum but it maps data represented spatially. The symbols are organised into broad regional areas so you get a sense of how different contries compare on a regional basis by simply recognising the colours. It’s a Dorling cartogram but it’s not entirely devoid of spatiality. The feet are made up of proportional circles showing the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per country. The metaphor is immediate as the shape of two footprints is a wonderful way of exploring the cost of our carbon footprint. Stanford Kay’s effort in mapping carbon emissions almost certainly fits this mould. Even Beck’s fantastic map of the London Underground polarises opinion with as many considering it a diagram. Terms such as diagram or infographic are commonly applied to maps that people don’t feel are worthy of the title ‘map’. Maps don’t have to look like maps though the further they veer from what we see as a traditional conceptualisation of space, the more people think of them in a different way. Posted in MapCarte | Tagged infographic, MapCarte, symbols, thematic MapCarte 238/365: Tracking Carbon Emissions by Stanford Kay, 2011 It’s an infographic…but really, at it’s heart, it’s just well designed thematic cartography. This combination of the written passages and an interesting graphic gives us a form of graphical story-telling that integrates many different visual components, including maps into a coherent whole. The overall layout is augmented by panels of text that bring the story to the same page rather than an approach which might have seen the map embedded in a passage of text. The graphics are easily understood and overall, create an interesting pattern on the page, inviting the inquisitive reader.
Each is represented using the same general form and pictographs encoded with shape and colour give us the detail. Here, two azimuthal projections of the globe are organised to support the use of leader lines to the information encoded using systematic, uniform pictorial graphics. Instead, it plays the role of the mechanism that leads to other detail and allows us to use forms that might not be useful in other contexts. It’s devoid of labels or any meaningful data. There’s no information encoded into the map itself. The map is used as the core though in truth it’s really used simply as an image. In effect, the infographic approach to cartography emphasises the role of layout in design. This example shows how a modern map-based infographic brings together the elements in a well-composed display. Perhaps where we’ve seen a development over recent years is in the use of maps as anchors for a story where a different visual aesthetic is formed by bringing together maps, strong non-spatialised graphics and other components such as text. We use design to encode meaning and to create visually interesting graphics that communicate to an audience. They are a specific form that deals with the spatial representation of data. Maps have always been information graphics. What most people think of as an infographic might be summed up in this fantastic parody from web-comic XKCD…the list-like approach to representing a vaguely connected set of facts using seemingly random graphical approaches. In trugh, information graphics have always been around but giving them a label has suddenly brought them into focus. The rise of the infographic as a form of representation has brought with it some unwanted baggage.
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