Customer Reviews

Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book should be required reading for anyone who is allowed to make maps with a GIS. It's actually a pretty quick read (3-4 hours for me) thanks to its concise and tightly organized text set in context of some very clean and simple graphics. There is even a healthy dash of humor (so welcome in technical writing), genuinely funny but always in service of the text.

Read this book to avoid the classic mistakes that all neophyte mapmakers commit.

I was honestly disappointed with this book, so much so, that I returned it to the seller. Although the subject matter it contains is quite good, the layout and presentation leave a great deal to be desired, especially for a book that is focused on cartography and which costs over $40.

My 2 greatest irritations with it were the following: 1) There is virtually no color in the book, with the exception of a few color plates in the middle. 2) Although the book's dimensions are roughly 9" x 7", the material contained inside appears to have been formatted for a small paperback. On average, it appears each page contains more than 50% whitespace. It feels like you are looking at a reduced slide show presentation that was converted into a grayscale printout.

My advice to prospective buyers of this book is to buy a copy of Monmonier's classic, "How to Lie with Maps", and Cynthia Brewer's excellent, "Designing Better Maps - A Guide for GIS Users" instead. The cost will be about the same - for 2 books.

To the authors of this book I say, "Nice try, but c'mon, you can do better than this. You're cartographers for Pete's sake!"

I bought this based on the reviews here at Amazon. This book presents some good ideas, most of which are intuitive, and in totality makes for a decent desk reference for the cartographer. However, as someone else has pointed out, the formatting of the information on the page is unimpressive and I would add, confounding and hard to read.

Most of the example maps in this book are black & white, and somewhat randomly placed in a sea of white space. After reading I'm still wondering what the author is trying to say with his stylistic choices. In either case it certainly weakens Krygier's point of view on 'a Visual Guide to map Design' imo. 'General mapping ideas presented in a pseudo-minimalist fashion' would make for a better title. Props for including a nude though.

-> Buy one of Brewer's books, you won't be disappointed.

I'm newly employed with GIS. I use ArcMap to make maps of properties for a real estate developer. This book was nice in many ways. It is very informative regarding styles, helping me create professional looking maps at my job. It was detailed enough to be informative, but was not overloaded by any means. The book was a quick read. It did not bog me down in boring details. It was well written, well organized, and well designed. I like the book and recommend it.

This was not quite the book I was looking for. It doesn't cover the topics very comprehensively. I was hoping for a book which talked more specifically about map design(i.e. colors, placements and such). The book is ok if you have never read about this topic before. For me who has read about this topic before it only took about 2-3 hours to read it through.

this is a good product. it has nice color maps and very visual. lots of good ideas and techniques.

Very Helpful book.
As a GIS student at the university of Washington, this book was recommended by our professor to help design our maps.
It has proved to be very useful.
More color would have been nice, but book is still worth it's price.

This is not a bad book, but the title and description bear almost no relation to its content. The audience of the book seems to be people who have occasional use for maps, but don't need a very professional product. The text is limited to thematic map design; there's very little about how different map projections work or how geographic features would be represented. There is consideration of some design elements, but the examples used were very limited in scope and somewhat artificial. Finally, there's almost no information about GIS, other than that it exists and can be expensive.

While I do a lot of GIS work and never took a cartography course when I started my career in geography research work. After searching through the local geography dept library, and searching the university bookstore for something simple, practical, and effective, I have to say "Making Maps" works great.

My background lies in biological and environmental work so there's quite a few times where I've been asked to make maps from a variety of different data sources for different audiences (i.e. scientific conferences, presentation diagrams, screenshots for emails, etc). Krygier & Wood's book effectively covers numerous cartographic principles while keeping in mind all the changes in the modern GIS world: i.e. the technological advances in mapping and geographic software, professional printing requirements, and the use of color in maps and how it may "play out" to different cultures around the world.

I really enjoyed reading this book over the holidays and found a lot of great mapping tips and techniques in it. It's a very strong visual guide and it's a lot more challenging to read than ESRI's simple intro guides. It's also more fun to read than a cartographic textbook! The list of other references at the end of the chapter are a good bonus.

But my favorite line in the whole book had to be on page 212 (choropleth maps) when the authors recommend to "please use your brain when making maps". Hilarious! There's gems like this in a few places through the book. A good read for the graphic artist in every cartographer and academically solid. It'll be a reference book on my workshelf for years to come.

What makes this book exception is not its clear design and simple text. It's a book about making maps, after all. One would hope the design was adequate. What distinguishes this book from its competition is that, implicitly if not always explicitly, it is about using maps, the arguments maps make. From the first page, a First Nation historical map, the argument is clear: Maps make arguments and making maps is about the best way to make arguments.
That's something worth seeing and reading. Design details are available in many places. This argument is not.

Tom Koch
http://kochworks.com