… is an understatement for the artistic tricks Daniel Huffman shares in his current post on the Something About Maps blog. The techniques shown encompass the treatment of the shaded relief, label brackets, blurs and glows, line generalisation, and more (many of which are detailled further in other posts on the blog).
While I am involved in the production of “analytical maps”1 (if any) rather than very professional cartography products, this post is an impressive treasure trove of advanced cartographic techniques.
If this kind of article interests you, I also recommend another recent post by Daniel, titled “On sin” . While it touches on the somewhat simmering AI “controversy” of the ICA2 Commission on Map Design (which I chose not to cover here), that is not the focal point of that post.
Footnotes
For lack of a better term. What I mean is: limited effort functional and pragmatic maps that usually serve an analytical end.↩︎
The International Cartographic Association is an organisation formed of national member organisations, to provide a forum for issues and techniques in cartography and geographic information science.↩︎