The dark-navy habit

I had made dark navy a habit. It held bright points and lines well, and it gave the first maps a family resemblance. That was useful once. Repeating it without asking why was not.

Three references, three different jobs for colour

The reference collection credits Wanmei Liang’s mangrove canopy-height map along the Seram Sea, shared by Milan Janosov. It gives me a useful question for my own work: is the colour describing the measured thing, or merely making the map recognisable? I want one vivid ramp to mean one thing, not several competing things.

Elizabeth Ashley Menezes’s One Point Per Hour follows three female grizzlies in Denali. The reference notes distinguish colour by bear and brightness by recency. That is a reminder to separate the jobs of visual channels. I do not need movement on every map; I need to know what the movement explains. On Dartmoor’s river map, building the network from main stems to headwaters gives the reveal a reason.

Jules Cheron’s weather maps put changing weather fields at the centre. The saved reference notes describe precipitation and temperature views, with forecast controls. I take that as a prompt to keep the map’s changing quantity legible, not as evidence that I have validated the forecasts or tested the live application.

The rule I want to try

A zero-chroma ground for this notebook, with the colour coming from the maps. Within a map, one vivid ramp when the question calls for a measured gradient; separate categories only when they carry a real distinction. This is a working rule, not a claim that all good maps look alike.

The starlight map can stay dark because its metaphor needs darkness. The river, access and Edinburgh revisions do not need night. Their lighter grounds leave more room for a specific finding.

I have not reproduced any reference artwork here. These are my notes from the local reference index, not a review of the makers’ full methods or a claim that I have exercised their interactive controls.