[MUSIC] So how do you get data on maps? How does that kind of work? What kind of data is there? I've made a million maps. That's me making a map at Newsweek with my former art director Lynn Staley, who was awesome by the way. That's a map during the Iran, Iraq war that we made as a pull out. So I have this love for making maps. This is a picture of my nephew Stuart, just as he is about embark on a national tour with his rock and roll band to play in a million different bars across country. My brother, his dad, sent me this spreadsheet showing where he's going. There were actually several pages of this spreadsheet. And I wrote my brother back saying I cannot tell where he's going from this spreadsheet. It's just so confusing to me. So my brother tore out of an atlas a map of the United States, a paper map and took a marker and he connected all of the dots. Watch how quickly you understand where this kid is going on his trip. Bam! Now you take a map like that and do it interactively where you basically can take the spreadsheet and marry it with the data. That's called GIS, Geographic Information Systems, that mixes geography and information together, and there are free softwares that will do that. Which you can see in the list that I've provided with this class. And so when you roll over the dot, it has all the information from the spreadsheet or whatever you've chosen, pop up. So it really shows the route. It's all this additional information about each site. But what is the stuff maps are made of? Well there was a guy named Jacques Bertin, who was this French cartographer who kind of designed a lot of the different things. They're called visual variables that we see as symbols for how maps work. We didn't always know this stuff, it had to be sort of invented and really really studied and explained. So when you look at a map your looking at basically areas, you know, states school districts, that sort of thing. So that's one thing you find on a map, and then there are lines. Lines can be roads, school districts, boarders, all that kind of stuff. So there are shapes and lines. And then there are points. And points can be city dots, they can be sites of arrests. Almost any kind of a thing that would be one address, like one point. So areas, lines and points are the three major components of a map. But then you can start manipulating those things a little bit. So you can change the shape of an icon or a point to indicate different kinds of information. So here we have triangles now, and dots and squares, they could be anything. They could be where the good bars are, or whatever, and then the dots are cities, that could work too. Proximity is a really important thing in design, where when you put things together, the mind perceives them to be the same. So in the case of the triangles in the upper right and the boxes in the lower left, you think that those all have something to do with each other. Even though they may not but our mind perceives them that way so it's a good thing to know when you're designing that this is a tool that you can use. Color is another one. You color things differently and it adds another element. You can add another piece of information to that map. Size is another one. See I've blown up one of the triangles and everybody thinks like that's the mothership and then the other two red triangles are satellites to that thing. And then you can start adding a little color to distinguish features. Everybody sees blue as lakes, so don't make lakes red, unless you're groovy and cool and you're not really hoping people get this in a hurry, but lakes are blue. I'm a purist in that way. But then you can also add again, more color to create these data maps, these sort of coroplast maps they're called. So now I'm seeing two different counties, or two different states, or something. It's separated the information even better. And so now if you want to make sense of all that information, you add a key in the lower right. And don't forget the scale so people know how far that is. Throw on some labels and this map all of the sudden has a whole lot more meaning. And if you really want to focus something, people's eye on one particular piece of information you can add a call out box or a pointer box to help people really understand that this is really what I want you to know about. There's all this stuff but this is really important. So this map actually combines with charts and it's showing the entire world of HIV like where it is, how bad it is. The charts down the bottom add more context to the map, more menusha, you know showing the growth and things like that. So really you can combine these things to make some great statements. But you also have to figure about how much information do you really want to show. This is a map that shows every place that Pope John Paul II went to. Every single city, every one and there are million dots on this map. Well there aren't a million because he didn't go to million places. So with all of those places he visited, we decided that we had to categorize them because it was just, we could have just taken the shotgun approach to everything and just splattered dots all over this map. And say whoa, he went a lot of places. But we wanted to give it more meaning so we colored in some of the dots into five year increments to give a sense of where he went during these different five year periods, and as you can see it gets pretty messy. There's a lot going on there. So this kind of detail, maybe you don't need this kind of detail. So here's another map I found online that basically just goes by country, like how many visits total he went to each one of these countries. So the darker countries he went a lot to and the lighter countries he went a lot less to. And the gray countries he never went to at all. So you can see when you're doing a map, you have to think about the different kinds of levels of information. If you just start saying, let's just show everywhere The Pope went, you know that's a, does anybody, does it really, is it relevant? Does anybody really want to know every place. And again, if that were GIS you could roll over these dots and will tell you what he did there maybe link to places that could be quite something. [MUSIC]