In many parts of this book I urge you to try to come up with novel and creative
solutions to your design needs, but there is considerably more space devoted to
cartographic standards and conventions. The reason is that, without a foundation
in standards and conventions, you cannot be completely comfortable with your
creative solutions. While ignorance does sometimes lead to novel solutions, you,
as the cartographic designer, need to know the fundamentals in order to assess
whether a creative solution is satisfactory. Remember that the goal for most stan‑
dards in map design is to lead to a cohesive set of rules for the symbology of
elements so that a viewer can easily and quickly gain insight from a map. Indeed,
as Colin Ware states in his book Visual Thinking for Design, “… the goal of infor‑
mation design must be to design displays so that visual queries are processed both
rapidly and correctly for every important cognitive task the display is intended
to support.”2