Congratulations on finishing the book! You should feel more confident in your map design skills along with giving feedback on other’s maps on the use of various cartographic elements such as the use of text, color, and symbolization. Hopefully you  have learned a little bit more about a city that you have been interested in as well! Even if we feel like we might know something about a city due to us being from that city or living in that city for a long time, maps might uncover relationships that you might have never thought about!

Where to go next?

If you are eager to learn more about cartography, then I recommend that you check out Penn State’s GEOG 486 course which this book was adapted from. The GEOG 486 course covers things that were not covered in this book such as flow mapping and projections, terrain visualization, and multiscale mapping. Other books that I recommend is Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users by Cynthia Brewer which goes more in-depth on the topics we learned in Digital Cartography. If you are interested in making maps for community purposes, then I would recommend Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS. This book combines storytelling and teaching cartographic principles all in one text!

If you enrolled in the Digital Cartography course, then we will be transitioning to learning how to maps using the ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud extension in Adobe Illustrator and will be using the Mapping by Design, A Guide to ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud by Sarah Bell. If you are not enrolled in the course, I highly recommend this book if you are interested in learning how to create maps using Adobe Illustrator.

Remember that your education in digital cartography should not stop at the end of this book. You must engage in lifelong learning if you want to improve your map making skills and find ways in which you can use your cartography skills! Things that you can do beyond reading is attending local conferences or GIS user groups focused on cartography. Also consider having a passion project (i.e. The Middle Earth Map) or be a volunteer and make some maps for a community organization to really apply and expand upon the skills that you learned in this book! Happy mapping!