Cartography Module 2

This week our assignment dealt with Typography. The objective was to make a map of Florida and label some specific cities, rivers and water features while using at least three different modifications to make the required elements stand out. I chose a mix of ordinal and nominal modifications to distinguish amongst the different features. For my first modification I varied the point symbols of the cities. I varied the size of circles I used to represent different cities. Cities that we were required to label I made used large circles for and other cities I used small circles for. For the state capital I used a large star with a different bright color in order to make it stand out. A second modification I made was varying the size and appearance of the text I used to label cities. For cities that required labeling I used a larger text and used a halo to add extra emphasis. For other cities I used a smaller text and no Halo. For the smaller cities I had to make sure label placement was in an ideal spot where a halo or callout would not be necessary. The final modification I made was to the water features. We had to label certain rivers along with swamps and marshes. I used the same font for all water features however I varied size and placement. For rivers I used a smaller font size and placed labels along river contours. For swamps and marshes I used a larger font and placed the label within the polygon feature wherever possible.

This map was a bit challenging to me as I did not exactly know what I should emphasize either water features or cities or Florida overall. I ended up compromising and trying to put an equal amount of emphasis on all features led me to the following product.