Land Partitioning and Cartographic Design Principles

              This week's lab is land partitioning and cartographic design principles. We learned the four Gestalt's principles to follow for map organization. The steps to follow are visual hierarchy, contrast, figure ground, and visual balance. Following these processes should help achieve a well-designed map that is concise, informative, accurate, creative, and user friendly. This week we created a map of the Ward 7 public schools in the Washington DC area. I implemented visual hierarchy in my map by labeling the roads with larger point lines for larger roads and the point size decreased as the roads got smaller. I implemented a white halo around all of the neighborhoods that were labeled. For the hydrographic feature, I used curved text for the label to follow the natural curvature of the river. I also used double spacing between each letter, 12 pt, and blue font. The title of the map has a 42 pt font and the subtitle has a 36 pt font. They both contain the Arial Bold font as I wanted it to stand out on the page.
               The symbology I chose for the road features achieved adequate contrast in my map. I chose a 0.25 pt, light grey color for the Ward 7 streets that really helped make Ward 7 stand out in comparison with the rest of the map. For the US Highways and Major Streets in all of the Washington DC area on the map, including Ward 7, I chose the ArcGIS 2D standard symbols. I felt using these symbols really added some depth and character to my map and kept it from being too bland. The school symbols were sized smallest to largest to correlate chronologically with elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. I also colored them lightest to darkest as well. I established figure ground relationship in my map by using a lighter color scheme for Ward 7, the focal area of our map. I chose a darker tan/burnt orange color for the entire Washington DC area. It complemented the light cream color I chose for Ward 7.
                This map was a little tricky to achieve optimal balance due to the "pac-man" shape of the Washington DC area being displayed. I chose to put the inset map on the bottom right portion of the map where there was the most space. I chose to put the legend in the northern portion of the map. This was because I was only required to include 3 symbols in my legend. I put the date and author name under the inset map. I felt if I included it on top, like I did the Data Source, it would look cluttered and take attention away from the more focal areas. The map frame and inset frame were sized appropriately to claim the majority of the space on the map. I really put for the effort to ensure that everything was centered and aligned correctly.