Module 2: Typography

 

    In this week's lab we focused on the finer elements of cartography in the form of typography. Our overall goal was to focus on the labeling of major topographic features within the state of Florida accurately and following typographic principles.

    To begin, after gathering the required data from the repository folder, we added the database containing the capital, swamps and lakes, rivers, counties, and cities layers to our blank map. After organizing the layers, we begun the process of labeling, simply by turning on the labels for the cities layer in order to see what we were working with. We separated the city layer points by county seat and populated area to show a difference in the ordinal, with cities representing a larger point and county seats being smaller. From here, we played around with different labeling properties and tools in order to create labels of populated areas only. In order to truly have control over the placement of the labels, we created annotations which allowed us to freely move, rotate and resize the labels any way we saw fit. 

    From here we populated the lakes and swamps along with rivers into our maps and repeated the process of creating label classes after filtering out all feature names we did not want to focus on. We changed the typography to match accepted typographic principles such as having italicized water feature labels with blue text. We further altered the water feature typography to have it bend with the river in the label properties. 

    After practicing some basics, the instructions dictated we label specific features in each class following the typographic principles from the lesson and in class. The map above shows the final results of the lab directions. All the specified water features, cities, swamps, and rivers are labeled and have been manipulated through the creation of annotations in order to reduce clutter, keep land mass labels out of major bodies of water, and are placed where there is no obstruction to other important labels. 

    The map was then moved to a layer where the map, neat line, frame line, title, legend, ordinal, author, source and date were placed. For the scale, I decided to use a scale bar as it could be used, even though this is a static map, to withstand enlargement and reduction. The final product is the map above detailing the major cities, major swamps, major rivers, capital, and what counties they reside in the state of Florida. 

    There were three notable changes I made to the map which I noted within my process summary. The first was changing the county symbology to a navy-blue variant color to have the river feature and swamp labels stand our more. The second change was to the swamps and lakes symbology, having them reflected as a darker gray to again have the river feature and swamp labels stand our more. the third thing I changed within the map was creating new annotation layers for city names in order to place them in the best spot. Following the "wheel" of preferred spots, some city name labels landed in the preferred spot, some in the first and others in the fifth best label placement spots.

    Overall, this lab was surprisingly challenging, with me having to update ArcPro in the middle of the lab in order to have the annotations show up properly. I learned a lot about typography and one thing I hope to carry away, besides everything, is not forgetting the difference between serif and sans (WITHOUT) serif.