This Mapbox theme is a slight revision from an assignment I completed for the Graphic Design in Cartography course at UW. The assignment was meant to give students practice with establishing a visual style by synthesizing form, type, color, and texture. To expedite this process, the professor recommended that we base our map style off of a preexisting style. To do this, the students identified the preexisting style's visual elements. I personally feel like I picked a challenging inspiration for my project.
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I based my style off of the French avant-garde movement known as Fauvism. I liked the striking colors and smeared textures seen in Fauvist paintings. Sabine Rewald from the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Fauve painters used unnaturally vivid colors to portray subjects that would otherwise be painted with less saturated hues. The plethora of hues made my assignment challenging. I wanted the map to be akin to Fauvism, but I also wanted the map to be readable. Zooming in presents the greatest issues with readability, but I think I executed the style well at smaller cartographic scales, especially at the scale seen in the linked preview. My second major challenge came from the undistinguished brushstrokes of the art style. The common method of establishing form is to draw strokes around shapes. Instead, Fauvist artists established form by juxtaposing adjacent fill colors. Likewise, I heavily relied on contrasting the  hues of different map features to establish form. Normally, I wouldn't do that.
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The class assignment also showed students how to quickly construct tiled web maps, one of the main types of maps that people encounter online. (Like GoogleMaps)