Module 1 - Map Design and Typography
This week's laboratory assignment emphasized the use of map design and typography to communicate messages and trends to map viewers. I particularly enjoyed this assignment, as I believe a map is useless if it is not communicating a clear message. The lecture for this week covered the five cartographic design principles: visual contrast, legibility, figure-ground organization, hierarchal organization, and balance. These principles are instrumental in creating effective maps. I will further assess how the maps I created this week satisfy these principles. The first part of this assignment was creating a tourist map for the city of Austin. This map was to emphasize elements of the area that tourists should be aware of, excluding live music. I utilized appropriate symbology to communicate the important map elements appropriately.
I chose to symbolize the Travis County layer with a black outline and light beige fill. This allowed for the other features to stand out. I symbolized the roadway with class 1 with a pink color and 2 point width. This allowed it to stick out from the county background and seem more ‘important’ or ‘apparent’ than the roadways in class 2, which I symbolized in orange and with only 1 point width. The hydrographic features I chose to symbolize with a light blue color, to reflect their color in the natural environment. For the golf course layer, I chose to use a dark green polygon with a thin black outline. I chose to use a dark green so it contrasted more from the light background of the county layer, but still represented the naturally occurring color of the golf courses. For the recreation centers, I chose to symbolize them with a red point symbol with a thin black outline and at 7 point width. This allowed for the points to stand out from the background, but reduced overlapping so one may visualize where exactly in the county these centers lie.
5 design principles and how they are applied to this map
Visual Contrast - I used a light gray color for the areas of Texas outside of Travis County which contrasted well with the beige Travis County polygon. I also utilized bright colors for the map elements so that they would stick out from the background and be clearly identifiable to the viewer.
Legibility - For my text size, I ensured that all text elements were readable in the final layout view and were all at least 10 point font or higher. This ensures the text is legible, even if viewing the map from far away. Likewise, I used symbols that were adequately sized and colored to distinguish them from other map elements. For example, I used a point size of 8 for the recreation centers, so they were still viewable without overlapping too much.
Hierarchical Organization - Important elements of the map are larger and more vivid than others, making them appear more important than other elements. For example, the font size is much larger for the title of the map than other text on the layout. Also, for road class 1, I utilized a brighter and larger width polyline, so that the viewer may note that these roads are larger and more important to the region.
Balance - To ensure balance in my map layout, I positioned map elements so that there would be minimal white space remaining on the page. The map itself takes up the most room on the layout, which allowed for me to place other elements, such as the compass and scale bar inside the map view. I placed the legend, source and credit information at the bottom of the page, where there was ample space remaining.
5 design principles and how they are applied to this map
Visual Contrast - I used a light colored basemap for the areas outside of the lease areas, which contrasted well with the beige and green lease polygons. I used a bright red for the areas logging could not be conducted in, which shows the company clearly what areas to avoid and cannot be confused with the rest of the lease areas.
Legibility - For my text size, I ensured that all text elements were readable in the final layout view and were all at least 10 point font or higher. This ensures the text is legible, even if viewing the map from far away. I also used text boxes with filled in backgrounds to ensure the text is easy to read from the map itself.
Figure-Ground Organization - For the lease areas, I used brighter colors that help distinguish them from the basemap. This makes it clear where the area of interest is on the map and focuses the viewers’ attention on the potential logging areas.
Hierarchical Organization - Important elements of the map are larger and more vivid than others, making them appear more important than other elements. For example, the font size is much larger for the title of the map than other text on the layout. Also, the lease prices have larger fonts and a dedicated text box, emphasizing their importance to the viewer (logging company).
Balance - To ensure balance in my map layout, I positioned map elements so that there would be minimal white space remaining on the page. The map itself takes up the most room on the layout, which allowed me to place other map elements around the map as appropriate.
The areas of interest and how I applied the typography accordingly
5 design principles and how they are applied to this map
Visual Contrast - I used a light gray color for the areas of Texas outside of Travis County which contrasted well with the beige Travis County polygon. I also utilized bright colors for the map elements so that they would stick out from the background and be clearly identifiable to the viewer.
Legibility - For my text size, I ensured that all text elements were readable in the final layout view and were all at least 10 point font or higher. This ensures the text is legible, even if viewing the map from far away. Likewise, I used symbols that were adequately sized and colored to distinguish them from other map elements. For example, I used a point size of 8 for the recreation centers, so they were still viewable without overlapping too much.
Figure-Ground Organization - I chose to utilize a different-colored polygon with a thick border to distinguish Travis County from the rest of the map. This makes it clear where the area of interest is on the map and focuses the viewers’ attention to this county in particular.
Hierarchical Organization - Important elements of the map are larger and more vivid than others, making them appear more important than other elements. For example, the font size is much larger for the title of the map than other text on the layout. Also, for road class 1, I utilized a brighter and larger width polyline, so that the viewer may note that these roads are larger and more important to the region.
Balance - To ensure balance in my map layout, I positioned map elements so that there would be minimal white space remaining on the page. The map itself takes up the most room on the layout, which allowed for me to place other elements, such as the compass and scale bar inside the map view. I placed the legend, source and credit information at the bottom of the page, where there was ample space remaining.
Visual Contrast - I used a light colored basemap for the areas outside of the lease areas, which contrasted well with the beige and green lease polygons. I used a bright red for the areas logging could not be conducted in, which shows the company clearly what areas to avoid and cannot be confused with the rest of the lease areas.
Legibility - For my text size, I ensured that all text elements were readable in the final layout view and were all at least 10 point font or higher. This ensures the text is legible, even if viewing the map from far away. I also used text boxes with filled in backgrounds to ensure the text is easy to read from the map itself.
Figure-Ground Organization - For the lease areas, I used brighter colors that help distinguish them from the basemap. This makes it clear where the area of interest is on the map and focuses the viewers’ attention on the potential logging areas.
Hierarchical Organization - Important elements of the map are larger and more vivid than others, making them appear more important than other elements. For example, the font size is much larger for the title of the map than other text on the layout. Also, the lease prices have larger fonts and a dedicated text box, emphasizing their importance to the viewer (logging company).
Balance - To ensure balance in my map layout, I positioned map elements so that there would be minimal white space remaining on the page. The map itself takes up the most room on the layout, which allowed me to place other map elements around the map as appropriate.
The next portion of this lab focused on applying typographical principles to a map. Instead of using the labeling feature within ArcGIS Pro, I was tasked with manually placing and editing the labels on a City of San Francisco map. This added to the challenge, as I had to ensure I maintained consistency with other similar map elements and place my labels appropriately.
General - Being that these text elements covered the largest areas of the map, I chose to utilize the largest text on the map. I used bold, black text with a white halo to increase legibility and visual contrast from the map background. The use of capital letters for San Francisco indicates that it is the most important/populous region on the map and thus covers the hierarchy of this city compared to other regions in the Bay Area.
Water Features - For the water features, I used a dark blue, italicized text. This is typical of water bodies and contrasts nicely with the light blue background, which ultimately made the text more legible. I also used a curved text for the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay texts so that they would cover more area and it is clear what bodies of water those names pertain to.
Parks - For the parks on the map, I used a navy green text. This allows for contrast between the lighter green park color on the map. I ensured hierarchy by keeping the names of the parks larger than the neighborhood names, showing they are more important to a tourist.
Landmarks - The Golden Gate Bridge text included a lead to the actual bridge so one clearly knows where the text belongs to. I used a similar text style to the general components, but made it lowercase and smaller to indicate it is less important than the general areas on the map. The use of the white halo helped ensure visual contrast and legibility.
Topographic Features - The topographic features, I used Constantia font, as it was more legible from further away. I also used black text and bolded the text to help ensure they contrasted from the road network already present on the map layout.
For the final portion of this assignment, I created two additional maps of Mexico that combined the two topics of this module: map design and typography. I assigned appropriate label settings to emphasize the parts of the maps that are important and included use of text elements, such as halos, to make the text more distinguishable from the background. I have attached these two maps below for reference.
