- Tanya: The more that we understand about color,
the more that people can research that,
the more it helps me.
It helps me communicate information better,
and it helps me understand
whether or not the people that read and look at my maps
are understanding them in the way
that I hope that they will be.
[gentle music]
A cartographer is someone who makes maps,
and cartography is a really interesting blend
of many different skills: graphic design,
international relations, and environmental sciences
really combine together so perfectly
to create a cartographer.
Maps help people see concepts
that they might even be really familiar with
in a brand new way.
Maps bring to life a story, right, in a way that text can't.
If I showed you right now a big table of numbers,
you're not likely to remember that table of numbers.
It's hard for you to pick out patterns.
If you put that on a map, if you see the dark spot on the map
or the light spot on the map, but in that spreadsheet,
there's no way you're going to walk away
with an understanding of those patterns.
The process of making a map, it has to start with an idea.
Somebody other than a cartographer has an idea
and comes to us and says,
"I would like to show this graphically."
We then ask them a lot of questions.
What's the pattern of these events that are happening?
How do we tell a geographic story with that information?
Who's going to use this map?
A map that's designed for someone in middle school
versus someone who is a scientific expert
would be different looking maps.
And so we become mini experts
in each of the areas that we have to represent
and in each of the topics we have to represent.
And then we start to design.
So we're applying colors, we're adding labels,
we're deciding which elements we want to pull to the front.
So which elements really stand out on the map,
that's called visual hierarchy.
We're trying to set the visual hierarchy.
What pops off the map first at us?
We can't have a map
where everything is at sort of the same visual level,
because what happens then is we can't make sense of anything.
It almost would feel like a plate of spaghetti.
You can't tell which line is indicating which feature.
So I keep up with current research in color,
because it's really important for us
to be able to rely on other fields of research
because color is a very important tool
for cartographers.
Our eyes interpret color in certain ways.
And so it's really important for us to understand
that certain colors rise off the page more than something else.
We know that the way that our eyes take in that information,
that blue automatically recedes to the background.
We know that red pops off the page and that our eyes
are perceiving that red as a stronger visual cue for us.
And so color can be used
to represent different categories of information,
and color then can represent different groups
where we don't want to indicate a value.
If we're trying to represent more or less of something,
that's where we would use a darker color
or a brighter color that stands out on the map.
The visual hierarchy pulls you in more.
One of the maps that we worked on in partnership
with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation
was to show the roads
that bikers would want to be on using color.
The most desirable roads are actually
like a red-brown kind of color.
And red would normally mean "Warning: Don't Go There."
But again, we're drawing in psychology research, you know,
using that concept of red being the color
that our eyes perceive, and it jumps off the page more to us.
We really want to draw bikers to the most desirable roads.
So we rely on research in all different ways
and the work done in all of these fields that intersect
that the work that we do is incredibly important.
Research in color really helps me.
It helps me build a better map, it helps me build a map
that I know other people will understand.
And we can continue to get even better
at our craft of making maps
because of the work that's been done by someone else.
[stately piano music]