Noted: For while the open door of online mapmaking has produced a lot of maps, it?s also brought about a standardization of aesthetics. ?To make it easy for people to make a map,? says Daniel Huffman, a cartographer at the University of Wisconsin, ?you need to simplify the process down and make things very uniform.? Riffs on Google Maps look for the most part like Google Maps, with its top-down view, muted color scheme, choice of line weights, and approach to terrain. Even original maps created on Mapbox or other, more powerful geographic information system-based software can lead, at the very least, to design that is ?sterile,? according to cartographer Kenneth Field. Certainly, the style is ubiquitous.
Office of Strategic Communication