There are now 4(!) blog posts about this issue on blog.thematicmapping.org.

I agree to some extent that accuracy is sacrificed for eye candy, but I’m not yet sure to what extent – and if the drawbacks of 3D visualisation are outnumbering the benefits. I find proportional symbol maps more troublesome than prism maps.

Sean, I would like to have a reference to the study you write about.

Best

Sean

Thanks for reading the blog. I definitely agree with the heat map comment – choropleths are not heat maps and lots of people label them incorrectly. Actually the picture you refer to was made with our API http://blog.fortiusone.com/2006/10/11/heat-maps-for-google-maps-aka-geoiq-mashup/ although we took it off line while we rebuilt our platform. Should be back this fall.

On the 3D thematic side I’m playing a bit of an intermediary from conversations with folks smarter than myself on cartography. My take is there are pros and cons to using 3D and 2D thematic techniques. I think educating folks on what those are is a great service, and a good debate on it is healthy and useful for the community. I just hope I can contribute effectively because I definitely would not label myself a cartographic expert.

Look forward to the blog post and learning more. I’ve been trying to track down the reference to the study on 3D thematics my friends referred to and will add that to the discussion if I am successful.

Lastly you are spot on with pushing the limits and being creative – everyone I talked to was in full agreement on that.

best,
sean

Some interesting perspectives you present here. I enjoy reading your blog posts.

First of all, isn’t it better to use the term “heat map” on maps of this type (a sort of density map), rather than mixing it with choropleth or shaded polygon maps?

I’ve also got several of the critical arguments about 3d cartography. Some of them are reasonable, others I don’t agree with. I will clearify my arguments on my blog soon – I think it’s best to do it by example. For me it’s not a question of one or the other, rather than giving the user both options. And I think 3d prism maps has some advantages over 2d choropleth maps.

Eye candy is important, – to give the user something nice to look at has always been important for cartographers, – but it’s of course a problem that “fancy maps” might distract the map reader. But, what’s eye candy today will be plain usual tomorrow…

I think it’s important to know basic cartographic rules, but it shouldn’t stop people from being creative, – powerful new visualisation tools also need new cartographic rules (or best practices) and skills.