Cartographic Skills Module 2: Intro to Adobe Illustrator

This week's lab was all about getting acquainted with Adobe Illustrator and how it can be used to put finishing touches on maps created in GIS and edit map layouts. I've only ever exported/printed maps directly from GIS, so this was a new experience. Figuring out how to use Illustrator has been challenging, but there's so much you can do with it!

Below is my finished map. The base map was created in ArcGIS from data provided, and I used Adobe Illustrator to adjust the colors, as well as the transparency of the water features so that county boundaries are visible underneath, to change the city symbols (using a find/replace script also provided for the class), to label some of the cities, to edit the legend, to resize the map (along with its scale bar, of course!), and finally to add images, various text elements, and a background color and to finalize the layout. 

GIS Week 2: "Own Your Map" Lab

Below is the map that resulted from this week's lab focused on map design in ArcGIS. This lab was a much more thorough treatment of how to customize map elements and overall layout than I got from previous GIS courses. The actual assignment here involved a map showing the location of UWF's main campus within Escambia County, FL, along with an inset map highlighting Escambia County's location within the state. (As an online student who's never set foot in Florida, I didn't even realize until now that UWF is almost all the way in the northwest corner of the state!) Nearby towns and interstates are also presented for additional context about UWF's location, which is indicated by the circled star to make it stand out. 

Cartographic Skills Module 1: Map Critique

This assignment asked us to find and critique two maps, an example of a well-designed map and one of a poorly-designed map, judged on the basis of Edward Tufte's list of map design principles detailing what makes a good and useful thematic map.

As my well-designed map, I chose this one from the U.S. Census Bureau:

This map does a good job of clearly and concisely presenting the largest ancestry group in each county of the U.S., both providing that information for individual counties and visualizing regional patterns and variation. While there would surely be even more variation at an even smaller scale (such as census tract), using the county-level data brings out patterns that are hidden by state-level data without making the map so packed with information that it’s hard to see what’s happening. It follows Map Principle 2, “complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency;” it’s clear at a glance what the map is showing, and there is no ambiguity or unnecessary information. It also follows Map Principles 7 and 8 about clear and thorough labeling, by providing a prominent legend identifying the significance of each color displayed as well as a list of what’s included in the “Other” category. A few aesthetic aspects of this map that particularly appeal to me are its simplicity (there’s a lot of information presented because the map covers a large area, but it’s only two kinds of information, county outline and biggest ancestry group), its visual appeal (colors are readily distinguished from one another but none of them are blindingly bright or clashing with what’s around them), and the use of the ancestry by state inset map, which I think adds context and emphasizes the amount of variation at the county level.

As an example of a poorly designed map, I chose this one from mapsofworld.com: