The Beef Bowl Map — Part II: Cartography Matters
A step-by-step tutorial on mapping beef bowl chain stores in Japan from scratch with Python and GIS
Previously on Beef Bowl Map
We (more likely, I) are making a map showing the spatial distribution of the three major beef bowl chain stores in Japan. We have completed the analysis steps and grouped all of the stores into 2km hexagonal bins. (Read my previous blog post for the details)
This time, we play with maps and doing some mapping and visualisation kinds of stuff.
Ways to present data
The map aims to present these two major things:
- What is the distribution of the chain stores across Japan?
In other words, where you could find more beef bowl stores, and in where you find fewer of them. - Which restaurant is the major chain in a specific area?
If one looks into a specific bin, in addition to knowing about the number of stores, he can know which chain has the largest number of stores in that area.
After doodling and meaninglessly looking into cartographic maps on the web for a few hours, I got the following symbology for every bin:
- Size: As a representation of the total number of stores
- Colour: As a representation of the major chain
Some notes: a rule of thumb on colours is to use at most only 7 colours in a map for indicating the information. More than 7 colours is a DDoS to our brain — we can’t distinguish between them.
Let’s split the map-making process into several elements and talk about the making process one by one.
0) Overall Style
Nothing is better than you got free design templates, especially when your art sense is poor as hell (I love making maps still — How ironic is it). ArcGIS Pro provides a firefly style, and you can download it completely for free, install it according to the instructions and then play around it. The Firefly Basemap is available to use for free — you just need to get a ArcGIS Pro software working on your computer.
In addition to the Firefly Basemap, a Firefly symbology style is also available for symbolising the data points/lines/polygons into Firefly Style. This is also available in ESRI website. John Nelson (my hero) provided this style base and he is more than welcome for us to “steal” those styles.
Let’s officially begin the map-making process.
1) Layout
Think about the size of the product before you start to do anything. An A1 size paper seems a suitable size for this map. In ArcGIS Pro, switch from Map View to Layout View, we are starting to do some publishing jobs. Go to Insert, select New Layout, choose Landscape A1 (841mm x 594 mm) as the desired layout and we could have a neat layout for publishing the map.
2) Basemap
Click on the Map Frame icon and drag a box which is more about the same as the size of the layout. You will get a map view in the layout.
Now it’s time to think about the basemap. The firefly point layers are out-glowing dots and we probably need to have something dark as the basemap. Two possible candidates: Firefly basemap and Dark Gray Canvas. Below are the firefly points added on both basemap for comparison.
The major advantage of firefly basemap is that they show locations of mountainous and forest areas are. Readers can easily exclude those park and mountainous area to see where are the built-up areas without beef bowls. Dark grey canvas is kind of minimal that only the sea and land boundary are available.
This time, I choose Dark grey canvas as the basemap. Why? First, the points get a sharper look. Second, as some of the points will be green in colour, those greens in the basemap may mislead the readers (hope a further de-saturated version of satellite image would be available in the future).
Go to Basemap -> Dark Gary Canvas. Add the basemap and drag the map to somewhere between Kanto and Kansai, covering Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.
3) Data Points
Ohhhhhh…. the points, finally. And it’s time to announce a piece of bad news — multiple attribute symbologies are not available in ArcGIS Pro (at least in terms of what I observed). In other words, we can’t distinguish the bins within the same feature class by its major chain and the number of stores.
Sod it.
Maybe there are ways to handle it yet I didn’t figure it out. Yet I took a little detour and still get the results I want. Taking alternative routes won’t hurt the process.
Size of the bins
Right-click the hex_bins feature class to open the Symbology panel. We will choose Proportional Symbols as our Primary symbology, use Total (or the column you named to store the total number of stores) as the field. Fill in minimum and maximum size of the symbols as 10pts and 50pts respectively, although you may prefer other numbers. Click on the Template and choose the FireflyShimmer_0 (i.e. white outer-glow point) symbol.
The points would then vary in size according to the total number of stores in the bin like this:
Till this step, we have finished half of what we want: the size of the bins varies with the total number of stores.
Colour of the bins
Make 7 copies of the hex_bins layer with symbology edited. Just right click on the layer name in the ToC and then right-click to paste the copy — or, use the keys we students use in every assignment — Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V. Don’t tell me you don’t know how to copy-paste.
Next, rename the layers with the 7 notations we made for identifying major chain in Part I. Your Table of Contents should look like this afterwards.
Double click the first layer (hex_bins_M — )to open the Layer Properties window and select Definition Query. Click on the Add Clause button and then construct the following SQL statement:
MainChain = 'M--'
After you click OK, immediately only points with the value of M — in the attribute MainChain are visible in the view.
Go to the Symbology Panel, click on the Template. In the Gallery of symbols, select FireflyShimmer_6 (the blue colour which is about the same as the blue in Matsuya’s logo).
And Ta-Da! We get want we want — colour-coded points with the size varies according to the store number.
One-seventh of the points completed, Yay! Repeat these steps for other 6 layers — Add definition query to subset the feature class, then change the colour of the symbol.
For reference, the following are colours I used for each Major Chain:
1. M — : FireflyShimmer_6
2. -Y-: FireflyShimmer_20 (#FF4A4A)
3. — S: FireflyShimmer_16 (#FFFB4A)
4. MY-: FireflyShimmer_4 (#BA66FF)
5. M-S: #267300
6. -YS: FireflyShimmer_18 (#FFB74A)
7. MYS: FireflyShimmer_20 (#B2B2B2)
You will see more and more colourful points added to the map until you finish adding all layers.
6) Legend
First thing first, my pet peeve on legends:
You don’t need a title named “LEGEND” to let readers know it is a legend
Don’t make your map redundant.
I make this tiny legend using Photoshop, using the firefly point symbology as the base. To keep the legend as simple as possible, the left indicates the relative size of the point, while the right indicates what does the colour of the points imply.
Put the legend in the bottom right corner and that’s it. :)
7) Final Touch
An essential checklist of map elements (so-called TOSSLAD) includes:
Title, Orientation, Scale, Source, Legend, Author, Date
Yet, just like Essential Waitrose, some essential items are indeed not essential. It is not a must to include all these elements in your map. Still, you need a legitimate reason for doing that.
Title
Just some random words that could explain what your map is doing and talking about is fine. If you can’t think of any good title, use the following:
The Geography of XXX
And replace XXX by the object you are investigating in the project and you’re good to go. Technically speaking, everything we deal with maps is geographically related, isn’t it?
Insert a text box by going to Insert -> Text. Rename the layer as Title and then double click to open the Format Text Panel. Go to Text Symbol, click Properties and then expand the Appearance Panel. Here, you could edit the text just like how you do in PS/AI/InDesign etc. We use Century Gothic as the font and size of 120pt to present our title.
Create a text box again and name it as Subtitle. The size of the fonts would be 50 pt. Type in the title and subtitle text and put those two text boxes on the top middle of the map.
Orientation & Scale
This blog on the necessity of north arrow and scale bar is worth every GIS student a read. You add them for certain reasons, not because you are told by someone.
I didn’t add scale and North arrow since the north orientation of Japan is obvious to most of the general public (For those who have no idea, click a few buttons on the Google Map, please). And since I already stated that the bin is about 2km in size, providing a scale bar is somehow repeating my words.
Legend
Hey! We’ve already done that!
Source & Author & Date
Create a text layer just like how we do it in creating the title text. Name the text layer as Source. We will again use Century Gothic as the font, with a size of 16pts. Put the text box on the bottom left corner. Type in the data source, author and date to let readers know when was this map created, where are the data comes from. And probably, who created the map is the most important of all. I don’t want someone criticizing this map without letting me know.
Created by Kenneth Wong (@Kenneth_KHW) on 25 March 2019 | Data Source: www.yoshinoya.com, www.sukiya.jp, www.matsuyafoods.co.jp, OpenStreetMap
Final (Real) Touch
Export the map as a PDF file and import it to Photoshop. Add a small vignette effect in Photoshop by adding a curve adjustment layer to make the map sort of “focused” on the centre. I also added a small paragraph on the left-hand side to let readers understand what the heck is this map doing.
Beef bowl map, DONE.
Hiatus
Add finally, here it goes. We played with some techniques on doing mapping in GIS, mainly related to editing the symbology.
That’s it for making the beef bowl map. Hope you could grasp something related to GIS, or Cartography, or Mapping, or Beef Bowls, or proofreading my blog.
