Maps are as much about art – and lies – as science

Here is the quote I want to highlight:

Harry Beck was the London Transport engineering draftsman who created the modern Tube map. With great art he decided to use only verticals, horizontals and diagonals while, for clarity, he greatly enlarged the city’s central area. The result is an all-time, trumpets-of-Jericho classic of graphic design, admired and copied everywhere.

But if you see a technical plan of the Tube lines as they actually are, it resembles a bowl of spaghetti spilt on the floor. The disparity between tangled ‘reality’ and Beck’s superlative, reductive modernist capriccio is shocking. It is not a faithful reproduction of underlying facts, but a lie that works. Therein is a central truth: the human mapping instinct is as much art as it is science.

It can also be as much (or more or less) lie as it is reality.  It flies under the radar with its load of napalm because it is a lie that works.  This doesn’t mean we abandon maps. Far be it.  Let us just let the mapper and the mapped beware.

That being said, I still love maps.