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.