Visual balance is important on a map. If I show you a map like this which of course has nothing on it just yet, but if I put that on there you'll see that there is not what we would call good visual balance. And that literary comes from this idea of cutting out sheets of papers so that you have you can see my hands here, you're cutting out the shape of say a country or continent and you put them on different parts of the map and that they actually weigh more. If it's a bigger thing it has more weight, there's more paper there. If it's a smaller thing it has less weight and so that kind of language has been carried over into this idea of visual weight is that if you have something bigger and it's on one side of the page, it actually makes the page tilt. And it's not balanced properly and why that matters is that your brain just kind of sees that as something's off, something's not quite right. It doesn't have sort of a pleasing overall look to it. And so here we have something that's not really well balanced visually. What if I move that over there, is that better? >> No, not really. How about there? Hm no, it's still not good. There? No. But that's good isn't it, okay. So that's visually balanced because we just have this basically one thing and yes, we have an island as well but generally we have sort of this one feature, it's centered on the page and that gives it better visual balance. Although I have to point out, it's not actually perfectly centered. It's centered vertically, but it's not centered horizontally. It's actually slightly above the center. And it's another kind of convention or just a thing that's known about people is that you tend to want to look a little above center. And so often when I'm making a map, I don't just go with exact center for something. I might just move it up just a bit so that it's centered just a little above the center of the page. It's not something you have to do. I just point it out because it's sort of one of those little factoids that got stuck in my head a long time ago and it seems to work well, is that if you can start by aligning things horizontally and vertically and then decide, based on the shape of the object, and whatever else is, do you need to nudge it a little bit? If it was sort of an unusual shape, maybe you would have to move it a little to the left or to the right. Just for it to have that kind of visual balance. Once you've placed your geographic area on the map, you can then place the other map elements around it to try and maintain that visual balance. So you might put the title above the geographic area. Maybe you put the legend below it. You might have a locator map that shows where in the world this thing is located. So you might put that kind of tucked in here, because Africa has this sort of little indentation here, maybe this is a good location for that. But there's lots of different ways that you can put this together. These are three different combinations. And they all have relatively good visual balance, there's not just one solution to this. You could do it the way we have here, where you have the title at the top, the legend at the bottom. That's kind of a typical convention. But maybe you want to use the space to the left of Africa, or to the west of it, to use the legend. Maybe you want to have a larger legend. Maybe the locator map is smaller. Or maybe you want the title to be at the bottom, especially if it was a figure in a book or something like that, maybe that would make the most sense. So there's more than one possible solution in terms of establishing visual balance. I want to give a little shout out here too that I got this example from an ESRI blog, so I have the url there if you want to have a look at it. Or you can find it on your own. You just Google ESRI blog design principles for cartography. It's actually from 2011 so it's a while ago, but it's a really well-written little blog post on visual balance. I adapted it from there for this example, so have a look at that if you want.
