Storytelling with Maps on Paper and Screen

In an  earlier story map  I explored the importance of storytelling and the natural allegiance between stories and maps (which themselves tell tales). This time around I'll compare and contrast what it’s like to tell stories with printed maps versus digital ones.

Maps in both media can be highly effective storytelling devices, and they inevitably bear some similarities. But print and Web are dramatically different platforms. Overall, the principles and techniques of mapmaking—and storytelling—are strikingly different depending on which one you choose.

I've been fortunate to learn a bit about these principles and practices during my time as National Geographic’s chief cartographer, and in my more recent incarnation as the founder of Esri’s Story Maps team. My career at Nat Geo began way back in 1983, when the Internet was barely a concept, so I've survived the long and sometimes painful transition to the digital age.

So how do these differences affect our approach to storytelling in digital media?

Size differences among devices mean digital stories must be responsive; they have to adjust to accommodate screens and platforms. My team strives to make Story Maps fully usable across computers, tablets, and phones, which sometimes means a story’s elements are rearranged based on screen size.

Motion is key to digital-age storytelling. Readers navigate a story by scrolling, clicking, tapping, or swiping. Maps can pan and zoom; animations can reveal change over time. The list goes on.

A word of caution, though—there is such a thing as gratuitous motion. Things that bounce, spin, or jiggle can get on a reader’s nerves. In the 3D realm, excessive flying transitions from one location to the next, especially if altitude and orientation change mid-flight, can be literally nauseating. So, use motion tactfully. 

Light, or the difference between reflective or emissive, may be one of the reasons that attention spans on digital media seem to be shorter than analog. We tend to read for shorter periods and less attentively on screens than on paper. Is it a generational thing? Younger "digital natives" are more comfortable reading on screen than older "digital immigrants." But Ferris Jabr argues in a Scientific American essay that "prolonged reading on glossy self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision." That's one of several reasons to strive for brevity in your storytelling.

As for Color, the range of hues available to us on screens is greater than on paper. Inks have a more limited gamut of colors than light-emitting screens. That's good news. But more vibrance isn't always better. Subtler hues are easier on the eye and mind, and tend not to distract from the message you're sending.

Publishing, formerly a painstaking, protracted process, is essentially instantaneous. Gone are the days when I would put a map to bed, wait for weeks (even months!) to finally see the map in print, and then immediately regret a design or editorial decision.

Finally, permanence is an issue that we all should consider. Will my future great-granddaughter be able to go to a library and find the printed maps I designed for National Geographic? Probably. Will she be able to dig up my Story Maps? I doubt it.

As a case study in the similarities and differences between paper-based and digital storytelling, let's look at two projects, both called The Two Koreas.

 About 15 years ago I worked with the talented cartographers at National Geographic to produce a supplement map of the Korean Peninsula. One side mapped today's North and South Korea; the other featured a history of the Korean conflict, which occurred a half-century prior to the map's publication. 

More recently, as tensions rose between the United States and North Korea, my new but equally talented team at Esri produced a Story Map about Korea's history, economy, and nuclear ambitions.

The printed map's "Forgotten War" narrative was similar in approach to many of National Geographic's thematic supplement maps from that era. Looking back, their use of maps, text, artwork, graphs, and sometimes photographs seems like a precursor to the web-based multimedia storytelling techniques we utilize in Story Maps.

Telling the complex, tragic story of a three-year-long conflict on a single sheet of paper posed some significant challenges. We developed a graphic style to make the large amount of information attractive and digestible. We chose a limited color palette, which we employed consistently across the series of maps. We incorporated a distinctive type treatment, added a torn-paper effect to archival photographs, and used a neutral background tint to tie the many elements into a single composition.

We used large numbers to guide readers through the sequence of episodes, and we featured one map as a centerpiece. Without a central focus the design would have looked less like a poster and more like a grab-bag of elements competing for center stage.

Another challenge posed by supplement maps was that they were folded for insertion into the magazine, requiring us to design a title panel into the composition.

In this case we included an archival photo and had it continue beyond the title panel, which helped make it a comfortable part of the larger composition.

Fast forward to 2017 and our Two Koreas story map. In much the same way that the Nat Geo team developed a visual vocabulary, we chose a red and blue-gray treatment that we used throughout the story. Not surprisingly, red represents North Korea; blue-gray, South Korea.

We used this split-color treatment for infographics, on photos, and for the maps themselves. And we opted for a black background, again as a unifying element.

No need, this time around, for a numbered sequence. Readers simply scroll through the narrative, although the story header includes bookmarks that jump to various parts of the story.

The most striking difference between the old-media and new-media treatments is how the maps are presented. As someone scrolls through the story, a historical map sequence reveals the possession of territory see-sawing back and forth between Communist and allied forces.

This ability to see a map (or series of maps) change within the same space is vastly more effective than glancing back and forth among maps positioned across a sheet of paper. It provides a visceral sense of movement and an ease of comparison that spatially separate maps just can't achieve.

Yet you'll notice that these maps aren't truly interactive. As much as I might wax ecstatic about panning, zooming, clicking, and swiping, my team and I have actually decreased the percentage of interactive maps in our more recent Story Maps.

Why? Well, for several reasons. We can use static maps to present only what the story needs, without the distraction of map interactions. Static maps load more quickly than dynamic maps (they're just an image, after all). And we can use scroll as a kind of simulated interactivity. Readers can move up and down repeatedly to study a series of maps, meaning they're interacting with the map series, in the same way that they're interacting with the whole narrative. They’re just not distracted by panning, zooming, or clicking. There’s no interruption of the flow, no new functionality to learn.

Both "Two Koreas" projects were successful, I think, but the Story Map gets my vote as the more effective of the two. Its mix of info-graphics and maps, tied together by a consistent and visually striking design style, taps the power of digital media to good effect.

Despite the advent of the digital age, large-format printed maps still linger on the walls of countless classrooms, offices, and kids' bedrooms. These maps are able to present an enormous amount of detail, sometimes including several thousand place-names, in a single glance. And in many cases, they do so with aesthetic panache.

These instantaneous, sweeping geographic panoramas are impossible on even the largest computer screens and retinal displays. I sometimes pine for the unique and exciting challenges of designing large-format wall maps. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to design many supplement maps for National Geographic back when budgets allowed for four or more inserted maps every year. We also produced—and the National Geographic Society continues to create—beautiful wall maps of the world, continents, regions, and countries in a variety of styles and themes.

The trick with large-format printed maps is to guide the reader through a subtle narrative that is the result of careful cartographic design choices. On a single sheet there’s no way to invoke timing or sequence like you can with webpages or mobile apps, where maps can be presented in succession. Even standard political maps, including the world map above, are designed to present information that “unfolds in layers of meaning,” as my friend and long-time mapmaker Larry Orman likes to say. Typographic treatments are hierarchical, with continents and countries more prominent than cities, large cities more visible than small towns. Political divisions are represented with tint bands, and terrain—less important on a political map—is shown in subtle shades of gray.

Digital maps suffer the confines of small screens. Mobile phones are puny in comparison with wall maps, and even the largest monitors fall short in size and resolution compared to the fine detail printed wall maps.

The compensating factor for the Web and mobile is the ability to access multi-scale maps that increase in detail as users zoom into the map. As we all know, it's possible on Google Maps to zoom almost instantly from a view of the entire globe to a map of a street corner at a scale where one inch equals 20 feet. A printed world map at that scale would be more than 100 miles across!

These interactive maps that invite users to pan instantly across landscapes and zoom effortlessly from neighborhood to planetary scales offer power and insight that were unimaginable only a few decades ago. A relatively unsung impact of these multi-scale, interactive maps—especially those that incorporate satellite imagery—is that they have changed the way nearly all of us perceive the world. The link from front yard to whole Earth is ubiquitous and undeniable. The Apollo program’s famous “Earthrise” photograph was a revelation; interactive maps abetted that planetary vision with a constant reminder that our locales, no matter how provincial or isolated, are part of a global system, a shared and finite existence.

So is one medium superior to the other? Are we better off returning to the analog days, or, at any rate, returning our focus to the art of print cartography? The answer is that both mediums are great—they're just great in different ways. Print is far from dead, of course; we can revel in the fact that we have two rich playgrounds in which to tell our stories.

If I were to distill into one idea the difference between map-based storytelling in print and digital, it would be that print provides the luxury of space—of presenting lots of fine detail across the expanse of a sheet of paper—while digital gives us the advantage of time, enabling us to unfold a narrative along the razor-thin membrane between past and future.

The next installment in the series is " Maps in Dramatic Roles ," which describes the various functions maps perform within a storytelling context.

This essay was created by Allen Carroll using Esri's ArcGIS StoryMaps. It was edited by Hannah Wilber. Learn more about  story maps here .

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