Black and White and Modern
Now that the color basics have been laid out, it is time to retreat a little and say something
about black‑and‑white maps. When GIS first started, black and white was the
norm for most maps. It was simply too laborious and expensive to create color maps,
with user interfaces being either nonexistent or very simplistic and color printers
hard to come by. Now, of course, color is ubiquitous because we have easy tools in
our GIS to modify colors in myriad ways and because they are easy to display on
our modern monitors and cheap to print on our office’s color printers and plotters.
So because of this near universal use of color it is actually difficult to come by a map
that only contains black and white (and shades of gray). The only exception to this
might be a map published in the interior pages of a newspaper. So why might someone
consider using grayscale in a modern map?