Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS

Citation

Krygier, J., & Wood, D. (2024). Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Chapter Summary

The fourth edition runs to about 300 pages in twelve chapters, arranged in the order in which a mapmaker meets the decisions: purpose, data, tools, geographic framework, design, colour and type, and finally generalization and symbolization. Pages are laid out as spreads of short text blocks around maps and graphics. An illustrated story (a "graphic novella") about two neighbours who make a map to oppose a planned road runs between chapters, a single map, The Flight of Voyager, is reworked in many chapters to show the effect of design choices, and each chapter ends with a page of quotations about maps and a page of further reading. Compared with the third edition, the chapters on colour and words have moved forward to the middle of the book, and the chapters on symbolization and abstraction now close it.

Chapter 1: How to Make a Map

The opening chapter presents the map making process that structures the book. New sections in this edition set out principles of feminist data visualization and principles of Indigenous data sovereignty and mapping.

Chapter 2: What's Your Map For?

The purpose and audience of a map are treated as the starting point for every later choice. The chapter compares paper and digital maps, now including mobile screen sizes, and has new pages on interacting with maps on screens and on visual storytelling.

Chapter 3: Mappable Data

The chapter deals with the data a map is built from. This edition adds material on aggregating data and on districting and redistricting, linked to the new attention to maps and gerrymandering.

Chapter 4: Map Making Tools

The chapter opens with the argument that the reason for a map suggests the tools, illustrated by Jack Kerouac's pencil map for On the Road. Making maps without computers covers pencil-and-paper sketch mapping, community sketch maps and a doctor who mapped his HIV patients' home towns and places of infection to see a pattern. Making maps with computers surveys the kinds of software involved (GIS, remote sensing, GPS, web mapping, bridge and graphic design software, programming languages), naming open-source and commercial examples, and lists discussion forums and conferences. New sections cover workflow, from planning to documentation, with a worked example of remaking a county map of U.S. credit scores from finding the data to sending files to the printer, and artificial intelligence, presented through an exchange with ChatGPT and a caution that designers keep creative control.

Chapter 5: Geographic Framework

This chapter covers map projections, distortion, geoids, ellipsoids and datums, using Tissot's indicatrix and side-by-side comparisons of projections. The Cartographic Perspectives review singles it out for the clarity of its graphics and explanations.

Chapters 6–7: The Big Picture of Map Design; The Inner Workings of Map Design

Two chapters treat map design, first the big picture and then its inner workings. Chapter 7 includes a section on visualizing visual differences (type size, symbol differentiation, light symbols on dark backgrounds and the reverse) and shows the Voyager map drawn with nearly identical black symbols as an example of what happens without a visual hierarchy.

Chapters 8–9: Color on Maps; Words on Maps

Colour and type now sit in the middle of the book, to reflect, the reviewer suggests, their place in the order of map creation. A page on visual variables formerly in the colour chapter has been removed.

Chapter 10: Map Generalization and Classification

The chapter title names its two subjects: simplifying geographic detail and grouping data into classes.

Chapters 11–12: Map Symbolization; Map Symbol Abstraction

The closing chapters deal with how data are turned into map symbols. This edition adds or expands graduated symbol maps and, in the final chapter, cartograms, multivariate choropleth maps and isopleth (surface) maps, with more full-colour examples.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: How to Make a Map; What's Your Map For?; Mappable Data

• Map making process: the ordered sequence of decisions, from purpose to symbolization, that organizes the book.
• Purpose and audience: the reason for a map and the people who will read it, which guide every design choice.
• Indigenous data sovereignty: the principle that Indigenous peoples govern data about their communities and lands, newly applied to mapping in this edition.
• Aggregation and districting: how grouping data into areal units, including electoral districts, shapes what a map shows.

Chapters 4–5: Map Making Tools; Geographic Framework

• Workflow: the planned, documented, often collaborative process of producing a specific map in its final medium.
• Sketch mapping: pencil-and-paper mapping, valuable for thinking and for community mapping where computers are unavailable.
• Projection and datum: the systems that transform the curved Earth onto a flat map and tie coordinates to a model of the Earth.

Chapters 6–12: Design, Color, Words, Generalization, Symbolization

• Visual hierarchy: making the most important features stand out through visual differences among symbols.
• Generalization and classification: simplifying detail and grouping data values into classes.
• Choropleth, graduated symbol, isopleth and cartogram maps: the main thematic map types treated in the closing chapters.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Design taught visually. The short text blocks paired with maps make the book usable as a thorough study, a skim or a quick reference, as Lisa Gaetjens notes in her Cartographic Perspectives review, which also praises the plain language and the absence of jargon. Reworking the same Voyager map across chapters shows directly how each choice changes a map's legibility.
• Software-agnostic and durable. Reviewers, including Gaetjens and Anthony Robinson in comments printed by the publisher, stress that the principles apply in any software, open-source or commercial, or with pen and paper, so the book does not date with a program version. Chapter 4 shows this approach: software is surveyed by category and example, not taught.
• Decisions tied to purpose. The organizing idea, that a map's goal, message and audience determine the best way to make it, gives students a framework for judging choices rather than rules to follow.
• A current edition. The fourth edition adds workflow, artificial intelligence, aggregation and redistricting, feminist and Indigenous perspectives, multivariate choropleth and isopleth maps, and updated data such as the 2020 U.S. Census.

Limitations

• Static maps only. Gaetjens notes that the book gives no specific guidance on interactive web maps, although many of its principles carry over.
• Not a software manual. By design there are no step-by-step instructions for particular GIS packages; students need software tutorials alongside it.
• Modest changes from the third edition. The same review judges the updates useful but not so extensive that owners of the third edition need to switch.
• A matter of taste. The comic framing and playful tone suit many students, according to instructors quoted by the publisher, but Gaetjens found the framing story a little corny.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this course list, Making Maps is the practical design book. Mark Monmonier's How to Lie with Maps is a shorter, earlier read on how scale, projection, classification and symbols can mislead; the two work well together, Monmonier for critical reading of maps, Krygier and Wood for making them. The GIS textbooks, Bolstad's GIS Fundamentals and Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind's Geographic Information Science and Systems, are broad treatments of GIS data, software and analysis; this book concentrates on the design of the maps that come out of such systems. O'Sullivan and Unwin's Geographic Information Analysis is a statistical text for later study, and J. B. Harley's essays in The New Nature of Maps supply the critical history of maps as expressions of power, a perspective the new feminist and Indigenous sections of Chapter 1 touch on.

The publisher presents the book as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in cartography, map making and GIS, while instructors quoted on its page call it an excellent resource for students new to mapping. In practice it works as the main text of a first cartography course, or as the design companion to a GIS course.

How to Use This Book

The authors address three kinds of reader: educated readers without mapping experience, students of geography, cartography or GIS, and GIS professionals who want to improve their maps. No prior knowledge is required, but having a map project in hand makes the book far more useful.

• Read Chapters 1–4 in order before starting a project: they set the purpose, data and tools, and Chapter 4's workflow section is a practical checklist.
• Study Chapter 5 carefully. Projections and datums underlie every GIS map, and the review singles this chapter out as especially clear.
• Use Chapters 6–12 while designing. Apply each chapter to a draft map, then compare it with the Voyager examples and revise; the visual-differences section in Chapter 7 is a useful check on any layout.
• Pair it with software practice. Work through a GIS tutorial in parallel, using QGIS or ArcGIS, and bring the book's questions (audience, message, hierarchy) to every map produced.
• Follow the further reading at the end of each chapter for deeper treatment of colour, type, classification and map history, and use the companion website.