mapmaking patterns

People think about space more in relative than in absolute terms. We think about the location, size and distance of something relative to something else. Maps for people to read should privilege the topological and relative metric properties of space over absolute locations.

Preserve and maintain topological relations of map features, including touch, disjoint, overlap and contain, even if this requires you to alter the location of features. For example, it a road follows a river, make sure the road does not appear to touch or overlap the river due to the scale of your map and the precision of your line data. Also preserve and communicate the relative size (larger/smaller than) and relative proximity (nearer to/further from) of elements.