Visualizing maps is a key factor when dealing with statistics and complex data, online maps as the ones used by Google Analytics, the Google service for web statistics, could take advantage of the internet medium to enhance the user interaction but what happens when you have to read those same maps on a different medium (say you what to print them) or with a different format size?

Checking this blog statistics I had to deal with this problem, I wanted to post images of the maps highlighting users for my Browsing this blog stats, London, New York, and Los Angeles browsers and users habits post and wanted to have images in black & white. The resulting images are not as readable as their original colour version.

Colour vs. B+W

If for online publishing you can stick to images in their original colour, the case could be you need to print your stats on a black & white printer, maybe you have to reduce the images size as to fit them to your documents layout. The following images should be considered as visual review of the different results you could face.