Module 4: Cartographic Design

In this lab assignment for Cartographic Skills, we were tasked with making a map showing the locations of public schools in Ward 7 of Washington, D.C. We also needed to display the schools by type (elementary school, middle school, and high school). Since this week's lesson was about good cartographic design, this map is also an opportunity to showcase the principles of visual hierarchy, contrast, figure-ground relationship, and map balance.

To that end, my first step after assembling all the data was to weed out unnecessary information so as not to distract from the map's purpose (the schools in Ward 7). I clipped the schools and parks layers to display only those in Ward 7, and I chose to display all the roads within Ward 7, but only major roads and highways in the surrounding area. I also made the Ward 7 polygon a light grey in contrast to a darker grey for the rest of D.C. and a light purple for the background. All of this was to establish figure-ground, where the eye is drawn to the area of focus. The roads and neighborhood labels are also shades of grey, dark enough to be seen but similar enough to the other base information that they aren't distracting, while the stark contrast of the red school symbols makes them stand out as the focus of the map. (I opted to let the parks stand out a little, too, to show their distribution in relation to the schools, but the schools still stand out most because of the bright color.) In other words, the visual hierarchy emphasizes the schools over the base information. In order to distinguish between the different types of schools, I employed contrast again in making the symbols different sizes. Finally, to achieve good balance, I centered the title and placed the legend and inset map so that each was occupying one large empty space, and spread out the remaining map elements to fill in the rest of the available space at the bottom of the page.

I was a little pressed for time this week and since using Adobe Illustrator wasn't required, I opted to make and finish my map entirely in ArcMap, with which I'm more familiar.