Full Disclosure
I do have to explain that I did not come to the GIS field completely without design
experience. While I did not have formal cartography training, I spent a year of college
in a landscape architecture program before finding my calling in the natural resources
sciences. You may detect some of that education coming forth in the book at times.
If there was one big thing that my year of landscape architecture schooling taught me
about design, it is that everyone is a critic. The positive way to think about this is that
your work can always be made better. Constructive criticism from a peer group can
take your work to a much higher level than if you design in a vacuum. I also learned
that the process of designing, critiquing, and redesigning can be immensely time
consuming. But without putting in the time and effort, the work will not resonate,
it won’t tell a good story, and it won’t convey the right information.