Cartography Lab

In our second lab for the Intro to GIS class, our goal was to make a map that shows the location of the UWF main campus.  It shows the relation of the campus to the major cities, interstate highways, and rivers in Escambia county.  There is also an inset map of Florida to show where the county is in the state.

The primary goal of this lab was to familiarize ourselves with basic cartographic principles such as layout, use of color, and essential map elements.  Additionally we were encouraged to think of things such as who the map's target audience was in order to create the best possible map.

To make the map itself, I imported the files for Florida's counties, Escambia county itself, Florida's cities, interstate highways, and major rivers, as well as a point file for UWF's main campus.  The map of Florida's counties and Escambia county were used to make the inset map that shows the whole state. 

For the central map, I used Escambia's boundary file along with the other files.  To only show the interstate highways and major rivers within the county I used the clip layers tool to create new files that only show the pertinent features.  To have the map only show the two cities desired, I created a clause where only Pensacola and Ferry Pass were selected using "select by attributes."  This created a new layer with only those two cities.  I used the label feature to label these elements so the viewer would know what they were.

I had the opportunity to choose colors for the map at this point.  I went with fairly traditional coloring based off of establish principles such as having the roads as red and the rivers as blue.  Having an intuitive map helps the viewer easily understand what is going on.  I then added in the necessarily map elements: the title, scale bars, north arrow, legend, cartographer's name, and sources.  The final set was to properly lay out all the elements so that the map was clear to read.