Greetings!
Welcome back to the GIS Journey as we kick off our time in GIS 6005 - Communications. Lab 1 focuses on cartography, the basic map elements, and typography. This is an excellent refresher from some of the early GIS courses, and gives renewed focus on the map design principles, and typographic styling. I think that typography is one of the ways to truly define your presentation style. While I dont think I have fully come close to fully defining mine yet, the exercises highlighted below are certainly a step in that direction. Overall, the purpose of the below were to explore techniques for manual and dynamic labeling, and implementing effective design choices. Those design choices need to enable the map to be legible, have visual contrast, deliberate hierarchy, solid figure-ground relationships, and ultimately - balance.
To that end, the two examples below focus on utilizing a hierarchy to the labeled elements through use of size changes, bolding, italics, font color differences, and positioning. By being able to separate out differences in feature category or feature hierarchy we can help build a more effective map, and this lends to improved visual balance.
This first example looks at San Francisco and highlights a number of different types of features throughout the city and around it. There are only 16 labeled features on this map, but there is still a deliberate difference in the hierarchy and presentation of the different labels.
This second example looks at Mexico and balances 3 different types of labels across the whole country. Prominent cities, rivers, and state names are all on display. This is a much more busy map by design, but still, deliberate design choices were applied to each of the label types. From differences in text size, bolding, color and contour differences, the tree types all stand out in different ways. The rivers flow near or along each of their respective rivers. The Cities are tied to representing points, and the states are overall smaller but centered to the max extent able.
