Cartographers have always been concerned about the appearance of maps and how the display marries form with function. An appreciation of map design and the aesthetic underpins our fascination with how each and every mark works to create a display with a specific purpose. Yet debates about what constitutes design and what value it has in map-making persist. This is particularly acute in the modern map-making era as new tools, technology, data and approaches make map-making a simpler process in some respects, yet make designing high-quality maps difficult to master in others. In the first part of a two-part paper, we explore what we mean by map design and how we might evaluate it and apply it in a practical sense. We consider the value of aesthetics and also discuss the role of art in cartography taking account of some recent debates that we feel bring meaning to how we think about design. Our intent here is to reassert some of the key ideas about map design in cartography and to provide a reference for the second part of the paper where we present the results of a survey of cartographers. The survey was used to identify a collection of maps that exhibit excellence in design which we will showcase as examplars.
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