Exercise 5

Exercise 5:

I first of all enjoyed this exercise and learned more about the counties of Wisconsin because I thought I knew most of them, but it turns out I didn’t know as many as I thought. I’ll go through the five design elements for this reference map again. For figure ground, the main thing I focused on was how much to tone down the out of state highway and roads. In Illustrator they weren’t very prevalent, but now I see after I turned it in that they are too noticeable in PDF form. That is something I will go back and change. For legibility, I think I could have made the county labels a bit larger because now I am seeing they aren’t the easiest to see along with the city names. I didn’t use anything under 8 fonts, but I should have used larger font anyway. In terms of clarity my biggest challenge was between the city and county names. I think I made the difference obvious though. One thing I notice is that in the legend primary highways is hard to see with the color I chose for the legend background. Another thing I did was change the indigenous nations from just a stroke to a fill. I thought it was hard to see them on the original map, and not they stand out more being filled in. I wish the highways weren’t so overpowering on the PDF form of this map because they didn’t look like that on Illustrator, so that is something I’d change as well. For balance, again the biggest thing was where to put and how big to make the title. I ended up putting it in the right corner because the legend was on the left and it would have been too much on that side. I also separated the legend into three separate ones because it just seemed to look better and clearer that way. I think I should have made the north arrow and scale larger now as well. For visual hierarchy, I decided to make the population a big focus point along with the other elements in the legend. Otherwise, I can’t really think of much else that caused any challenges. I feel as though I keep improving with each map which is exciting. Looking back, I would also change the lake labels so the Michigan one was vertical and the superior one was spread out more.

Exercise 3

Lake Map

Loon Lake is located in the boundary waters of Northern Minnesota. It is just a short canoe and portage away from the Canada border. Gunflint Lake, which is located in the top left portion of the map, is situated on the Minnesota-Canada border. There is a Loon Lake lodge located on the bottom right corner of the lake. This is where the influence for the maps title came from because it is the wood sign that welcomes you to the lodge.This lake is great for trout and pike fishing and is a beautiful place to kayak, canoe, or just spend a beautiful day on the lake. The closest big city to Loon Lake is Duluth which is about 150 miles away.

The lake was created from the Minnesota DNR websites contour map of Loon Lake we were provided with. The contour lines were digitized from the pdf version which was the most time-consuming part of this process because of how many there are. Loon Lake is quite deep and has a challenging shoreline. The background is brought in from google maps satellite images and the lake was just put over the top of the background.The lake is the focus of this map, so the rest of the elements are very simple. There is a more artistic legend of the contour lines, simple north arrow, label of Gunflint lake, and Loon Lake Lodge. There are no labels on the lake itself to keep the clarity of the lines.

Exercise 2

South American Reference Map

Exercise 2 entailed a use of cartographic skills to enhance a reference map of South America. I will be covering how I used the five design elements throughout this exercise. In terms of figure-ground, the hardest decision to make was how dark or light to make the Oceans. I went with a deeper because I thought it was more visual appealing. Also, in Illustrator the latitude and longitude lines appeared a lot lighter than they do when put into PDF format, so that was a challenge I wasn’t expecting. For legibility, my first draft of the map was less legible. All fonts were pretty small, and they were hard to tell apart. For my second draft I went with different fonts and font sizes for it to be more legible. This also goes along with the clarity of the map. I think I improved by changing the colors of fonts to differentiate the elements like the rivers and mountain regions that I didn’t have changed in the first draft.  In terms of balance, I struggled with how big to make the North Arrow because I don’t have much experience with cartography at the time. I made it smaller in the second draft and made it align with north on the longitude lines. Otherwise balance wasn’t too hard with this map. It was just trying to decide how big to make the South America title. Lastly, for visual hierarchy I didn’t change much because everything was pretty much in place already. This wasn’t that difficult for this reference map I thought. Otherwise I didn’t have very many problems with this map maybe because I had just completed a reference map of Africa last semester for GEOG 200.