Module 2- Cartography- Typography

     This week we learned proper typographic guidelines when map making. In addition to standard feature labeling, we explored annotation as a more versatile option. This was of particular interest to me as it solved some of the issues I had when I was trying to adjust my labels during my Intro to GIS final project last year. We were given data of Florida counties, major cities, rivers, and other water features and told to create a map labeling/featuring specific areas of interest.    

    Using ArcGIS, I created a map using the data and used the select for attributes option to only select the features I wanted to highlight from each category. I used a mix of traditional labeling and annotation labeling. I used annotation to label the water features- this was particularly helpful for the rivers. One of the rivers had an odd angle at one point in the lettering using the labeling option that I was able to smooth out by adjusting the vertices once I converted it to annotation. I made sure all my water features were italicized appropriately and added a halo effect to the swamps since there wasn’t a consistent color option that made them both clearly legible. I didn’t like how the halo obscured so much of the Okefenokee Swamp, so I made them partially transparent. I made the capital city distinguishable from the other cities with a star. I kept the serif font suggested in the lab exercise for the rivers and made sure it was consistent among all the water features and used a consistent sans serif font for the cities, title, legend and credits in order to limit my map to 2 fonts as recommended.

 Here is my final map: