Cartographic Storytelling: A Deep Dive with Daniel Huffman

How Huffman is Navigating the Fine Balance between Complexity and Clarity

The only thing better than a beautiful map is a beautiful map with compelling story-telling.

For those who love maps and the stories behind maps, a peak behind the cartographer’s curtain is always a treat. Accompanying a map with a thoughtful narrative about the decisions and process behind the map is cartography’s version of the fourth wall.

Few do this cartographic theater as well as John Nelson and Andy Woodruff, both of whom were mentioned here previously for their recent public offerings. There are those of us who try to emulate these giants in our own humble works. Then there are the torchbearers like Nelson, Woodruff, and Daniel Huffman.

Daniel’s latest presentation to the world is a map created for Scientific American. The map highlights the proximity of Indian leopard habitats to human settlements on the Indian Subcontinent.

Like much of Huffman’s work, the map is stunning both in story and design:

Daniel’s walkthrough for the leopard map goes into detail regarding the process behind the map. The well-written words that create a map of the map, if you will, are a wonderful complement to the visual end result of said process.

Huffman performs this type of exercise regularly, making cartography and cartographic thinking accessible to a general audience through simple, seemingly-effortless prose. The information as presented by Huffman proceeds with a natural flow akin to, say, how a river network coaleses and marches toward an ocean.

Huffman’s portfolio is littered with these kinds of cartographic explainers and tutorials, alongside all the great maps in the collection too, of course. Daniel is not only a great cartographer but a great teacher as well.

One of my favorite sections from this particular piece is the following excerpt, where Huffman ventures away from the intricacies and technicalities of cartography and design. Here Huffman ventures well beyond the borders of the map, out into the wide open savanna that is the human condition:

The real world is messy, and generalizing it into apprehensible conclusions is the point of cartography. Not all complexity is bad, but every added bit of information makes the map slower and more difficult to interpret, so it’s important to strike a balance that leaves the main conclusions clear. And, again, this is for a general audience, not scientists planning the details of their next field trip, so this is a good situation to prioritize communicating clear, broad patterns.

This commentary is a brief but powerful aside from the making of the map, but not at all unrelated to the making of the map. It is a tip of the cap to the nuance of our world and our lives in it through the nuance of Huffman’s cartography and decision-making process. Huffman is acknowledging the dichotomy of complexity and simplicity, and in turn exposes to us the reality that one of these cannot exist without the other.

Hence Huffman produces our charge as communicating beings: To make due, simply.

The lens through which we catch a glimpse of this condition, in this case, is Huffman’s mapping and thinking prowess. It is a lovely filter for such a lesson.

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