Cartographic Skills Module 3: Typography Lab

This week's assignment for Cartographic Skills was to create and label a map of Marathon, in the Florida Keys, in accordance with the lesson material on good cartographic design and typography. The base map and inset map were created in ArcMap and exported to Adobe Illustrator. I consulted with Google Maps to locate each of the places that needed to be labeled.

I first labeled the islands, in all caps as is suggested for areal features, using AI's "type on a path" function to place labels directly on the islands where they would fit, and using leader lines for those that were too small. Bodies of water are also labeled in all caps, and I made the type blue and made the customization of shearing the text to give it the appearance of being italicized, both of which are conventional for labeling hydrographic features. Since the city of Marathon actually covers most of the islands pictured, I opted to indicate it with areal color (green) rather than as a particular point. Finally, I placed point symbols at specific locations on the map to indicate towns, the airport, a state park, and a country club, and labeled these using "normal" text (but black to differentiate from the dark grey used for the island labels) and leader lines, since none of them could be labeled without the label overlapping the coastline or another feature. I made two modifications to the symbols, all of which were from the libraries included in AI: 1) I made the state park symbol a darker green than the default to make it stand out better, and 2) I gave all the symbols a little bit of a drop shadow to help them pop out to the reader, since they're kind of small and this is a moderately busy map.

While Illustrator is a powerful tool, I'm not finding it to be particularly intuitive to use, and it seems to me that it's a lot more work to label by hand and create a legend from scratch than it would be to do those things in ArcMap first and then use AI to edit them and add finishing touches. Hopefully as the course progresses I'll get better at using AI, or if not then at least get to experiment with other approaches to finishing maps.