
188 Web Cartography: Map Design for Interactive and Mobile Devices
• Animations can show more than temporal change. They can be used to
show location (e.g., blinking symbols to highlight an element’s display
date), illustrate how data are spatially distributed across a landscape,
and emphasize the area something consumes at a particular time.
• Keep your map animations short. The more complex the data, the
shorter an animation should be. Humans simply cannot maintain
an attention span long enough to retain lots of information from an
animation.
• Simplify the data used in animations. Ordinal-level data (rankings)
are often more easily interpreted ...