Cartography part 2

Hey guys, I know it has been a while since I have been able to update this blog, so the next few posts are going to come like rapid fire now that I'm on Christmas break. The first map I'd like to talk about is a mental map that I threw together for a project. It consists of drawing a map according to a colleague in another class. The map itself isn't very difficult to draw but is very time consuming to design and implement. The first major aspect of the design is to create independent states with no over lapping lines. So in order to accomplish this task, I began drawing the states. Every time two lines came into contact, I'd go into the layers panel and clip and duplicate the single line and then have the line on the two separate layers. While this does not sound very intuitive, it does allow the user maximum control of each state. Maximum control is the end all result for the high class cartographer. Another feature this map has is it's photoshopped images in the display. A few of the states have some sort of symbolic image that user thinks of when talking about the state. Overall, it was a fun map. not to be taken seriously of course.

Moving on to a more serious map, we were given the opportunity to choose a state and map selected demographics about that particular state. The style of mapping we chose to use is that of Choroplething. Choropleth maps essentially depict divisions in data and are represented through increasing color intensities on a map. The map that I picked was Arizona. In it, I had to do research on selected demographics through the website (http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml). From here, I selected my data and broke it up through the statistical method of natural breaks.  Once I found the breaks, I designed a three class system to represent that data on the map and then chose the appropriate colors. The method of color intensities I devised was through the monochromatic colors via the harmony rules in Illustrator. After applying some artistic skills to the map, I devised this below.