Why A and B

I want to keep the first versions visible. A polished replacement can hide the most useful part: the decision that made it better.

For the first four days of Familiar ground, I used a shared dark frame. It made the series look related. It did not mean that each map was answering its question well.

What stayed, what moved

On day 1, the stars stayed. Dartmoor’s hills made sense as lights of different sizes, but I was asking colour to explain height while size explained drop. In B I kept drop, defined it in plain words and added relief beneath the points. Three callouts replaced thirteen labels. The night ground had a reason to remain.

On day 2, the question became where the streams go. Seven river colours were more detail than that answer needed. Two sea colours, a lighter ground and a staged build made the network easier to follow. I also had to be explicit about the denominator: B includes named leats in its stream-length total; A’s quoted shares exclude them. A new percentage is not necessarily a changed landscape.

Day 3 needed less furniture and a larger number. B puts 48% first and uses two greens for the layers behind it. That does not remove the awkward part: registered common land is a proxy for land covered by the 1985 Act, not an authoritative legal map. A clearer drawing must not become a more confident claim.

For Edinburgh, I stopped using colour to distinguish 51 clusters with eight reused hues. The boundary and its inside/outside share were the more durable story. The clusters changed with the settings; the share inside the heritage line did not.

What the comparison taught me

I had been treating consistency as a decision already made. It should be a question I ask again: what does this ground, legend or colour help a reader understand?

B is not a declaration that everything is solved. I have not tested these maps with readers on real phones in daylight. The learning log is my own assessment, not audience evidence. I am keeping A alongside B so I can point to a specific change rather than claim that the work simply got better.