Map Critique

The first lab assignment for Cartography is Module 1: Map Critique. We were instructed to locate one well designed map and one poorly designed map and evaluate each using the map design principles. The well designed map I chose was a geographical map of Mora County, New Mexico. The map was beautifully structured with a good layout and contained all of the important map elements. There was an inset map, two scale bars (one for elevation and one for distance), all of the roadways in the county, and relief was shown for the mountainous terrain. It also contained a well structured legend and data source. The layout and aesthetic design of this map is one I aspire to obtain in my own map making skills. The map that I chose for the poorly designed map really paled in comparison to the map of Mora County, New Mexico. It was a map of the United State's capital populations in 1999. The map author chose to use different sized circles to show the different populations. This pushed some of the city labels off of the map and the big circles even took up space in multiple states. The author should have used a choropleth map to show the different population. I would have chosen different shades of brown to correspond with the population, with the lighter colors going for the less populated and the darkest for the most populated..There were many map elements missing from the map such as a north arrow, scale bar, border, data source, and author name. The map is also not effectively labeled due to some of the large circles crowding space on the map of the United States. Indianapolis is off of the map and located up near the map title. Santa Fe has double spacing where it should be single spaced. The legend only contains numbers to the corresponding circles with no units. The map layout is poorly designed with too much blank space and a legend that is too near the actual map space. The map title should be capitalized. This map is bland and awkward to look at.





We also downloaded Adobe Illustrator and practiced opening a simple map we produced and shared via ArGIS online. I am looking forward to future lab assignments to learn this new ArcGIS version. I currently feel comfortable with the ArcMap 10.4 version, as I use that at work. The new version seems easy enough to follow. The assignment did not take me very long and in fact, I had time to go through it twice.