Week 3 - GIS Cartography

This week's lecture and lab was all about cartography. We read about the history of map design, the cartographic process, and building a nice looking map with all the essential elements. For the lab section, we created 3 maps focused on Mexico: population of the Mexican states displayed in a chloropleth map, urban areas in central Mexico, and an elevation map using raster data. I felt like the actual "building" of the maps went surprisingly well. I did the technical steps of all three first, like adding data, building new shapefiles, and labeling features, then went back for layout and colors. That of course, is when we map makers into a time vortex and lose entire afternoons to tweaking and trying to figure out how to make ArcMap more like Corel or Illustrator. At some point, we have to give in and go with what we can figure out.

The map I chose to post is the urban areas map. While I am pleased with the final results of all three of my maps, I feel this one is has the biggest sense of accomplishment. Not because of difficulties with data, instead because it seems that maps heavy with line data can go from bad to worse very quickly. My first few hours with this map were filled with comments of "This is such an ugly map" until I finally got a good color scheme going and sorted out better line weights. I would have preferred to do a mask behind the text, but couldn't figure out how to make it work like Arc Help says it should, so I went with a halo instead (I have a pet peeve about not being able to read text when it is laying over jumbly map data). I also realized at the last minute that I would like to call out that the urban areas were selected due to population size, but I wasn't sure how to add a subcaption to the legend, so I had to go with a * note instead. All in all, for starting out so ugly, I think it came out quite nice.

Central Mexico Urban Areas map, showing populations greater than 1,000,000.
Also shown are railroads, rivers, and federal highways.