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.