Making Maps Make Sense
If at some point in the future you find yourself wandering around downtown Kansas City, Mo., and you come across a wayfinding sign that shows you how to find what you’re looking for, congratulations! You will have benefited from Lisa’s map design skills.
Lisa worked for Corbin Design of Traverse City, Mich., to design the map portions of a pedestrian wayfinding system for the city of Kansas City. These maps were tough to produce. She had to combine input from GIS data, Google Earth, street maps and photographs to make sure the wayfinding maps were accurate.
KC SmartPort's interactive map features the ability to turn on and off various elements of KC's transportation and distribution network.
The city & county map on KCADC's thinkkc.com site uses Flash scripts to pull demographic data from the back-end database.
KCALSI uses its interactive maps to demonstrate the enormous basic and clinical research resources in the KC metro.
Maps Show Up Everywhere || Lisa’s map design proficiency has proven itself a blessing since so many of our clients have used maps in their communications projects. Interactive maps have been employed on web sites for the Kansas City Area Development Council, KC SmartPort, the KC Animal Health Corridor and the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute.
Plus, firms like New York-based SELLS, which has offices in states up and down the Atlantic Coast, use maps and directions to help clients locate all of their offices. In fact, most businesses like to provide their customers with a map to their location. And while this may seem a bit “pedestrian” to many of you, making a map that makes sense is different from simply making a map.
A History of Map Making || Lisa has been designing excellent maps for much of her career. I suppose spending a number of years working for a transportation engineering firm led to a lot of them. Transportation needs maps.
Anyway, over the years she has designed a lot of maps. When I asked her what unique techniques she had developed that help her make her maps which are easy to read and understand, she said this... “having the ability to draw the map elements (like all of the highways and streets) with a mouse, keeping the details simple, using color effectively... that’s about it.”