GIS5007 Module 3: Cartographic Design

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I'm back from vacation and was itching to start on my layout for this module, because this week's lab is on Cartographic Design.

With Cartographic Design, we were heavily advised to keep Gestalt Design Principles in mind, including visual hierarchy, contrast, figure-ground, and visual balance. If one doesn't keep these principles at the core of map-making, then there's a high chance the message you're trying to send will be lost or misinterpreted.

Ward 7's Public Schools. We focused on the elementary, middle, and high schools in Washington, D.C.'s Ward 7, with other environmental features, like parks, waterways, and roads, accentuating it.

As you can see from the map above, we had to create a map of the public schools located in Ward 7. Due to the awkward shape of Ward 7's polygon/boundary, it was a testament to my confidence when placing my map elements. I moved my elements around so much, slightly tweaking them here and there, that I resorted to scribbling down different revisions on sticky notes. I'm glad I did so, because I'm quite content with my final layout. After all that trial and error, this map feels the most harmonious to me.

To make the focus of the map (the school points) features pop, I wanted to select bright warm colors like red and orange. Especially since the District of Columbia's flag contains 3 stars and 2 red stripes, I found those colors fitting. Like in the previous module, I stuck to my guns and made my custom basemap of Ward 7 a basic dull green, which helps the parks, rivers, and roads stand out. Furthermore, I took a lot of inspiration from ESRI's John Nelson and his recent YouTube video on improving map layouts. (If you haven't taken the ESRI MOOC on Cartography or watched his videos, I highly recommend it!) Some of the tips I took from him are to dilute the north arrow and scale bar so it doesn't detract from the main features/focus, which is Ward 7. To tie in the point features to the legend, I made sure to outline the different legend blocks (that listed each of the schools by elementary, middle, or high school) by the corresponding school symbol color.

I played a lot with shadows/gradients this time around since the module advised to focus on figure-grounding with dark areas behind the main focus, which was lighter. In my case, my Ward 7 polygon was more colorful, brighter/lighter than the layout's dark gray background gradient and the D.C. polygon. I even went the extra mile when designing this map by creating another graphic from scratch, the Capitol Building and the red D.C. flag inspired title bar. (Something about making something yourself is so rewarding.) Note to self and others: be wary about the amount of layers -- graphics and gradient blocks/backgrounds -- you create to be this creative. It did slow down my ArcPro quite a bit that made things run slow and lag.

Other than some hiccups with exporting the layout to JPEG due to some of the background gradients overlapping with the different map frames, ArcPro choking up, and my indecisiveness in layout making, I overall had a fun time making this map.

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