Is your map effective?

Kenneth Field, Research Cartographer, and Damien Demaj, Online Cartographic Product Engineer over at Esri offer this up:

We all have favorite maps that we think are great, but rather than just saying a map looks great, how many of us are able to take a critical look at it, evaluate it, and explain why it looks great? Having the ability to reflect on and evaluate maps as information products is important to understanding effective cartographic design so you can optimize communication of the intended message in your own maps as well as be able to understand why other maps work. In this blog entry, we’ll briefly look at some static maps and a web map to see what we think makes them great and then show you how using a checklist gives you the tools to reflect on maps in the same way.

Get their checklist here (pdf) »