Maps
Aesthetics in cartography relates to the visual experience of map reading and can take two forms: responses to the map itself as an aesthetic object (e.g., through detail, colour, and form) and also the subject of the map symbolised, often the landscape (e.g., a particular expression of terrain which forms an imagined visual experience of the aesthetic).
Cartographers make aesthetic judgments when designing maps to ensure that the content forms a clear expression of the theme(s). Antique maps are perhaps especially revered due to their aesthetic value, which may seem to be derived from their styles of ornamentation. As such, aesthetics are often wrongly considered to be a by-product of design. If it is taken that aesthetic judgments are produced within a certain social context, they are fundamental to the cartographer's symbolisation and as such are integral to the function of maps.
Read more about this topic: Applied Aesthetics
Famous quotes containing the word maps:
“The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“And at least you know
That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army
Happens to be concerned—the reason being,
Is one which need not delay us.”
—Henry Reed (1914–1986)