People love to throw everything including the kitchen sink onto their maps. This talk will look at why this leads to a mental burden, making the map harder to read and putting some readers off entirely. What alternatives there are, how this links to other concepts such as visual hierarchy and layout, the history of thinking about clutter with Tufte and Cairo, and how to keep your viewer foremost in your mind. I have seen one too many maps where they have thought great symbology was the goal and not helping their readers, this talk will help pull this back and give the listeners a really good view to take with their map creation. This talk will be more focused on cartography theory rather than practice with open source tools, however it willl give examples using qgis.