 Hello, I'm Hans van de Kwaas, lecturer at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. In this video I'm going to show you how to design maps. These are the learning objectives of this lecture. After this lecture you'll be able to design maps using GIS, choose the appropriate legends, and know how to use the right file type resolution and compression for maps that you produce. As you know maps are an important output from GIS analysis. These days maps are not only produced as hard copy paper maps, but also used in presentations on the screen or on the web as dynamic maps or interactive maps. GIS desktop software has different views to work in. We have the map canvas where you do your GIS analysis and there often is a print composer or layout view where you design your map. Which elements do we need to put on a correct map? It is mandatory to use a title on a map if the map is used standalone. If we want to include the map as a figure in a report or a scientific paper, we can put the title in the caption. Also the title should not contain the word map because it should be clear for the audience that they are looking at the map. It's also mandatory to have a legend which forms the key between the elements we see on the map and the symbology and related to the real features. There needs to be a scale bar so we know the scale of the map and the north arrow that shows how it is rotated relative to the north pole. It is optional to add acknowledgments or sources to add the name of the map projection which is mandatory if you use a grid or a grittical. You can put a logo on a map and you can use a grid or a grittical to indicate coordinates. Only use this if the map is used for navigation. In a report generally we don't need a grid. Here we see an example of the map. We see the title here on the top. We see a north arrow and we see that the north arrow is pointing to the left because this map is rotated and we see a scale bar with units and degrees. It's more common to see units and meters. Here we see a legend which is the key to the features that we see on the map. And here are our acknowledgments. The legend is used to translate the real objects to the map symbols and the legend is the key to the symbols that we use on the map. Games needs intuitive colors and symbols. Also text needs to be readable and the units need to be there. So if it's elevation in meters we need to express in the legend that the units are in meters. When GIS software produces a legend after calculating a new raster or vector layers the program defaults are always wrong. You should always check the minimum and maximum value from the meta data and know if we deal with continuous or discrete or boolean data and we have to adjust the legend accordingly. For points, point factors we can use different symbology. We can change the size of the point. We can make it relative to map units or to millimeters on the paper. We can give the symbols a different color, a different outline. You can choose between different sizes and different shapes. You can also make it dependent on the attributes that are displayed. For lines we also have a set of tools that we can use. We can change the width of the line and we can change the type of the line. And for polygons we can choose the filling of the polygon and the outline and the pattern of the polygon. Here we see some examples. We see a pipeline for water in blue. We see a polygon with buildings in red and a park or forest in green. For continuous rasters we can choose ramps. It is important that these ramps have colors that are intuitive. For example blue for cold and red for hot or green for vegetation or blue for water. If you do this inverse then it always reminds me of these hotels where they swapped the red and the blue knob of the shower and when you want to wake up in the morning and take a shower that you get a cold shower while turning the red knob. So it leads to a lot of confusion. Here we see a digital elevation model with a legend that is appropriate where the green are the valleys and red to white are the hilltops and in blue we see the lake. For discrete rasters we use random colors. That means that each class has its own color but still the color needs to be intuitive. So also here blue for water, green for vegetation etc. For the north arrow we can choose different symbols depending on the style that we like. And we can often choose to link the rotation of the map to the rotation of the north arrow so it really reflects where the north is on the map. We can express the scale of a map in different ways. We can use words 1 centimeter represents 250 meters or proportion 1 centimeter on the map represents 25,000 centimeters in reality or we can use a scale bar. We can also use a grid. I recommend that you always use a scale bar for the scale because when you make a map you'd never know if it needs to be changed in size. So if we project a map on a screen it will look differently on the computer screen or on the screen of a projector or if we print it out on a poster on A0 or A4. If we use a scale bar the bar simply scales with the change of size of the map. So better not to use the other ways. We can also add to our map an inset or an overview map. So we can show the overall area and an inset to show a zoom in area or we can give an overview so show the country and then a zoom in the map is a zoom in of a certain area within the country. And on the right we also see a nice example of a legend that is used. Now we need to choose the fonts that we put on our maps. If we present maps on paper then Serif is often more readable and for the screen Sans Serif is more readable. For text, normal text we use proportional fonts and for computer code or commands we use monospaced. We can also choose for different types thin, light, medium or bold. And it depends a bit on the audience. So we can use times for formal communication while we use another one like this junk 5 for a more dramatic one. It all depends on your audience. So where to put the information on the screen or on the paper. But generally we use the example on the right where we have the title at the top the main map on the left and then on the right side the legend. It depends on where the most important information needs to be. And in countries where we read from left to right and from top to the bottom the most important information should be on the upper left and the least important on the lower right. We can also use neat lines to separate parts of the paper or the screen for the map and for other parts. It makes it more neat but the problem is that if you use it too much it becomes more like a puzzle. So the overall advice is to keep balance. Your map in the end should look really balanced and the attention should not be pulled away from the content that is important. What is very important after you have produced your map in the design view of your GIS software is to think about how to save the file. So if we want to save a GIS map we can save it for the screen for presentation by a projector or on a website or in a presentation. That's the first choice. We could also choose to put it on a paper. So if it's for the screen we cannot see more than 100 dpi. If it's for the paper we can use a very high resolution and typically larger than 600 dpi, dpi is dots per inch. Then we need to know if it's vector or raster data. For vector data we can save it as a GIF file. A GIF file is very good in compressing lines. It stores where the line is and the color of the line. We could also use a newer format, the PNG, Portable Network Graphics File, which encodes very well also the vector format, but also the raster format as you can see. A JPEG is typically used to compress rasters and they reduce some kind of block compression where homogeneous areas are stored in larger blocks. So if we have a wide wall we can use a large block. While if we have a lot of contrast the variability is stored in smaller blocks. This of course does not work well for vectors where we have sharp boundaries all the time. Also raster can be stored in PNG. So for a paper where we have the much higher resolution the vector data can be stored in EPS. This is generally a format that we use when we publish in scientific journals. For publishing on high quality paper anyway. We can use SVG. This is a vector format that we can edit in vector editing programs like Inkscape. Very nice open source program to further process your maps if it's in SVG format. And we can also save it as a PDF. For raster we can store it in a TIFF and we can always use the PDF. Also if it's a combination between raster or vector the PDF is always a nice format as long as you have a high resolution chosen for the paper. At the end of this lecture I want to show you some examples, good and bad examples of maps they are produced by my students in the past and let's have a look. This map has actually not much that has been done right. We see if we look at a first glance we'll see a big lake here in the center of the map. But if we look at the legend there is something like DEM but it's not expressed in human language. DEM underscore mask and it has a legend which has values. It says value with high and low. So probably it is elevation but it has an inverse legend. It's not a big lake that we look at but it's mountaintop. Also we miss the units of the height. And this is a typical default ArcGIS legend where we always get high, low and value. First of all you need to replace value by elevation or the units in meters and make it human readable. And high and low is as if I'm stupid that I can't see that 4084 is higher than 1421. So you can remove high and low. The north arrow well it is there it just looks a bit ugly where it has been put. And then let's have a look at the scale bar. It's better to use multiples of 5, 10, 50, 100 and not multiples of strange values like 22.75 or pi because it's very hard to use practically for measuring. Then this map has a grid around it. The grid has latitude, longitude coordinates but probably this map has been projected. So if it is projected and to make it useful it's better to use a grid with a projection. But you can use latitude, longitude especially for larger areas. But the funny thing is that this grid also extends beyond the map area. So we can also measure for example the coordinate of the legend or of the scale bar which doesn't look really useful. This one looks much nicer. Here we see the water, the streams in blue. We see basins and subbasins with subtle colors. And we see the elevation map with height in meters above sea level clearly indicated in the legend. Intuitive colors. There's a north arrow and a scale bar and the legend, north arrow and scale bar also put in a place where the information is not the study area. So it is no problem that it covers a bit of that area. We miss though a title in this map. This one does not use intuitive colors. So it looks like a nuclear disaster where we have some nuclear power plant in a big green dot which has not been put at the right position because it is below the other things. And then we see some green water flowing southward. Of course, the stream has to be blue. And then there are some strange polygons which the maker of this map says it's catchments but then in meters is a bit strange. We would expect that it's catchments and discrete classes where each catchment has a number or a name. And definitely not elevation that is increasing. Also a lot of decimals are used even if it is elevation. Also the scale bar is not right. Use multiples of 13. The title has a map. We can see that it's a map. So we can better omit the name map from the map. Here we see another one. That's a good title, a north arrow. The water is blue, the outlet is clear. It has a clear scale bar and it has something like a subbasin's elevation. There's a typo there. It says in meters. So it might be that the person calculated the elevation but it's more probable that this...