Behold the California Cheese Trail Map – or at least so it claims to be. Below are a few example principles employed by the map.
Layering
In this map, the artist has specifically used three-dimensional layering to depict freeways and cheesemakers atop a map of the broader San Francisco “Bay Area.” Freeways are marked by white lines as well as the freeway number. Each cheesemaker location is represented by a pin bubble icon sitting atop the underlying geographic layer. This helps to highlight the relationship of each cheesemaker’s location relative to various freeways as well as distance amongst different cheesemakers. Link to principle’s project 1 post here.
Uniform Connectedness
This is one of the Gestalt principles of perception. It posits that elements with universal visual properties are perceived to be more related than elements that don’t share such a universal property. In this case, using the same graphic above, we see that each cheesemaker is graphically represented on the map by the same pin bubble icon. Each of these icons are of the same shape, size, and color. Note there was no project 1 post about this principle.
Iconic Representation
The map makes use of pictorial images to help users understand, amongst other things, capabilities and product offerings of each cheesemaker. In this case they specifically use a combination of arbitrary and symbolic icons. The arbitrary icons include those representing organic and farmstead cheese. For the former they decided to use the USDA Organic seal and for the later they icon is a historic jug of milk. The remaining icons are symbolic and somewhat represent the origin (e.g. type of animal from which the cheese is derived) or the concept (shopping basket for mail order and calendar for whether an appointment is needed). Note there was no project 1 post about this principle.
– By Q aka Alex Duong
Dear Q: thanks for sharing your map and bringing up the gestalt principle, I noticed the use of icons against the milky yellow background also served as a figure-ground relationship as a divider for different blocks content, from a bird’s eye view with the smaller size image. The idea of creating a cheese map is just awesome and I think the color scheme really offers the aesthetic for all sorts of dairy products in general.