My family’s map of Great Britain:
When I was younger, my family lived in England. While we were there, (basically) every single weekend we would go to a different castle or sight seeing location. While we were there, we would stop by a gift shop and get a pin for the attraction. Eventually we collected tons of pins, and we decided to make a map of the countries and pin them in their corresponding locations on the map.
What makes this map interesting from a design aspect, is the fact that most of its design decisions were made by my mother, an elementary school teacher with no design background whatsoever. So its fascinating that even on a map not built by a designer, design principles are present. They are so vital that even an untrained person uses them in order to present information.
The first, and definitely most obvious one is Color. The map itself represents a few countries, and you can see the land is clearly the green areas, the sea surrounding the islands is the blue background, and if you look closely, you can even see the borders between Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are done with yellow embroidery
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Another pretty easy to spot example is Consistency. Each attraction location is represented by a single pin, all of which are about the same size. Whats interesting to note, is for attractions that did not have a pin for sale, my parents would use an image from the guide book, print it out onto Shrinky Dinks, and glue those onto pins in order to use for the map. You can see a few above on Ireland, and even more on the bottom of the next image.
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Consistency also holds true for Scotland, where a large amount of their castles used almost identical designs for their pins, only adjusting the shape to represent the castle itself.
Finally, the most fun conversations about this map come from people who have also been to some of the locations on it, and that leads me to my third principle. Recognition-over-Recall. People are able to generally remember a general area where they saw an attraction, but cant necessarily point it out, with this map, they can recognize the actual site, and see exactly where it was in the country, rather than having to look specifically for where it is before finding it. It leads to all sorts of fun talks about how someone saw this one castle, and they think it was “somewhere around….. ah ha! Right here!”
What other principles can you see built into a map made by a school teacher?