M2: Typography

The goal of the Typography lab was to understand typical naming and style conventions used in map making. General rules like using italics for water features, using font and style to denote nominal and ordinal values, as well as continuing to adhere to the 6 Commandments of Cartography.  During this assignment we were instructed to build a map of Florida from provided datasets, and then make changes to the symbology, typography, and color scheme, overall building the map in our style. 

I built my map and decided right away I wanted to take advantage of the dust color line and stick with natural tones for the land and features. For labeling cities I toyed around with using graduated symbology to show the size of different cities. This worked well for the northern and Panhandle portions of Florida, but in South Florida the cities were too large and too close together, and it became difficult to understand. I also attempted to create separate label classes based on population, so that all cities with a population 250,000 - 499,999 would be labeled in a larger font than cities 50,000 - 99,999. I was able to accomplish this, but the size breaks were a bit abrupt and the map looked crowded with text. In the end I kept the basic convention from the assignment of separating the city symbology by "County Seat" and "Populated Place" but changed the appearance of the points so they fit the map aesthetic. I also created a custom label class so only the cities I wanted to show in the assignment were displayed. 

Customization of the map was the name of the game. I stuck with a National Parks inspired theme, but there are endless color and theme options.

For this assignment I also added Tallahassee as a feature, since it is the capitol and should be displayed, but was not originally included in the assignment dataset. 

Though our classwork left the rivers labeled in a lovely turquoise dust shade, when I reduced the scale of my map to the size I intended to export, I realized the names were too difficult to read. I changed the river label font and color and added a halo to keep the features more readable. I also increased the space between the label and the feature, which I feel made the river features easier to see. The use of italic type for river name helped distinguish rivers from cities, and the use of Tahoma for swamps kept those features visually distinct from cities and rivers. 

Lesson Learned: I am a bit chagrined to admit I've been using ArcPro off and on for five years but heavily for the last two years, and still through this assignment I "discovered" full use of the label ribbon. In the past I've usually saved my labeling for the Layout design window instead of the map view. Properties I needed to change that I couldn't access through the Label Properties pane I would edit by converting the labels to annotations and fix manually from there. The full use of the label ribbon is an excellent tool to have, and will save a good deal of time.