Cartographic Design

This week's lesson introduced us to the elements of cartographic design.  This involved learning about the Gestalt principles of things like visual hierarchy, contrast, figure-ground, and balance.  Utilizing these principles serves as a framework for learning how to properly construct a map that is visually beautiful through its layout and how well it conveys its primary goals to the viewer. 

The goal of this map was to display the location of the public K-12 schools of Ward 7 in Washington, D.C. using the cartographic principles of design we had just learned.  The base data was provided for us, but I had to decide how to lay out the content in such a way to make it visually useful.  The bulk of the map work was preformed in ArcGIS Pro with some final touch up work being completed in Adobe Illustrator.

The location of K-12 public schools located within Ward 7 of Washington, D.C.  The primary objective of this lab was to understand and implement the various principles of proper cartographic design.

In creating a map that will show the schools of Ward 7, part of the assignment was to create appropriate symbology for the schools.  I made the school symbols increase in size with the elementary schools having the smallest icons and the high schools having the largest.  The icons are a vibrant purple and yellow which make them contrast against the duller neutral earth tones of the map.  The assignment did not explicitly request the the names of the schools be listed, but without that information the utility of the map is limited.  So I took the symbology another step and coded the shade of yellow to the school type.  This makes it so looking at the list of schools it is easy to pick out the school's designation and unite it to its symbol.

Another thing I learned in this lab was the use of annotations in ArcGIS.  I used this to create text for the neighborhoods within Ward 7.  The default placement of the text contested with some of the other map elements so I carefully had to change their placement so they appropriately blended in with the rest of the map.  A large part of this lab was dealing with the design principle known as "visual hierarchy" which means placing the most important elements in such a way that they are most visible while deemphasizing the background information.  The names of the neighborhoods provides great contextualizing content - especially considering what school a child goes to often depends on what neighborhood they live in.  However, the neighborhoods are not the most important part of the map so they are displayed in a more washed-out gray text.

The concept of figure ground is the notion of making the most important part of the map distinct against the background.  This put focus on the area of interest.  For this lab, I used the screening technique to make Ward 7 lighter than it surroundings and pop out against the darker background.

The shape of Ward 7 naturally lends itself to creating empty space for the placement of other map elements.  By putting content such as the legend and the scale bar in these places it creates a sense of balance within the map.  I tried not to cluster too much information in one particular place so that no part of the map seemed too heavy but instead complemented the central focus of the map.