on bringing cartographic aesthetics to the workplace - a challenge

[OT from cottage renovations]
[excerpted from an email sent to colleagues at work]

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Thematic maps, long appreciated as an information-rich visual medium for conveying dense geospatial information, have an aesthetic that one often takes for granted.  It doesn't have to be that way:

See Tim Wallace on bogus art maps. 

Personally I think we should look to our municipal art heritage and come up with a Jackson Pollock themed map - with live zoning or emergency response data of course - to commemorate the centennial of his birth next year. 

This is not as far fetched as one might think - a Mondrian set came out of some GPS drift analysis I did last year, and it occurs to me that some of the heat maps I've been tinkering with (not on company or customer time) could adapt rather well to a Pollock theme. 

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I don't really expect anybody to be interested in taking it on, but if a suitable opportunity comes along over the next few months I will try to shape the outputs in that direction.