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Showing posts from March, 2023

My opinions on aesthetics in map design... based on academic research

As you may be aware, one of my goals from this project is to provide a calm and relaxing take to fantasy mapping, and so I believe that it is important to explore the theme of aesthetics when designing maps as it plays a big part in this ethos.  Whilst I was conducting some research into the substance of wellness in cartography, I noticed an evolving pattern in map aesthetics over a number of years thanks to the work of some academic researchers. For instance, when I was exploring Alexander Kent's research papers on cartography aesthetics, I noticed a large amount of progress on the subject since the publishing of his first paper in 2005, when at the time, map aesthetics was not a commonly discussed topic and the academic community was beginning to explore the idea, to 2013 when a set of standards for improving map aesthetics was established.  I have also seen an increasing amount of interest recently in integrating social elements when we think about aesthetics in map designs. For