A framework for Pop Art maps design Sidonie Christophe 1 , Charlotte Hoarau 1 , Anahid Kasbarian 2 , Antoine Audusseau 2 1 IGN, COGIT Laboratory, 73 avenue de Paris, 94160 Saint-Mandé, France; Université Paris-Est Email: {sidonie.christophe; charlotte.hoarau}@ign.fr 2 IGN, ENSG, 6 Avenue Blaise Pascal, 77420 Champs-sur-Marne, France Email: {anahid.kasbarian; antoine.audusseau}@ensg.eu 1. Introduction Creativity in cartography is currently more and more explored with the help of existing cartographic and image processing tools. Among others examples, an online competition called “Check my map” has been organized in order to propose a new map of the Parisian subway network, from the official dataset of stations and sections. Creative maps have been made highlighting various cartographic styles -- old map, pixel map, night vision map, etc. – based on some specific geoprocessing treatments (generalization, schematization, etc.) and graphic semiology’s choices (colours, thickness, shapes, typography, etc.) 1 . Proposing various cartographic styles to help users to improve their maps according to their preferences, needs and intention is a long-term research issue. A cartographic style is traditionally considered as a specific manner to render geographical information due to specific history and practice of cartography (Kent and Vujakovic 2009, Benova and Pravda 2009, Beconyte 2011). Moreover the term style is used according to its analogy to a graphic artwork. Online experiments have been done 2 but the way to apply artistic styles in cartography to enhance map quality is few systematically described: map design “à la manière de” Masters Painters has been proposed in (Christophe 2011). In this paper, we aim at proposing a framework to make Pop Art map design in order to be later implemented in on-demand map design services. In the first part we precise our approach to describe what a Pop Art cartographic style may be and give guidelines to make Pop Art maps. In the second part we propose an evaluation grid of map samples to analyze the influence of the geographical dataset and the graphic semiology’s choices both on map readability and Pop Art effect. Finally we discuss about our results. 2. Guidelines to make a Pop Art cartographic style Three typical images have been selected as visually representative of the Pop Art movement. Figure 1 presents these images that we consider as inspiration sources for the Pop-Art cartographic style in progress. The Che Guevara image highlights high saturated colors and complementary colors’ contrasts (Figure 1, a) 3 . The Marilyn image, a photo-silkscreened painting, highlights bright colors and a relief effect based on silkscreen and black colors (Figure 1, b) 4 . The Lichtenstein image, as the manner of cartoons, highlights dialogue balloons, pencil marks, Ben-Day 5 dots, white and fluorescent colors and also black color underlying relief (Figure 1, c) 6 . We consider that those elementary visual characteristics are very typical of the Pop Art movement. Our purpose is to formalize how they could be used in 1 http://www.checkmymap.fr/creation-design/carte-metro-paris 2 Watercolor maps on http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor/ 3 Gerard Malanga, 1968. 4 Andy Warhol, 1962. 5 ‘Ben-Day dots’ is a printing process coming from the illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day: it consists in colored dots closely or widely spaced, providing visual effects 6 Roy Lichtenstein, 1965.