Module 2: Cartography

This week's lab focused on the topic of cartography, or the practice of creating maps. We were tasked to create a map showing the location of the University of West Florida's main campus location.

Data:

We were provided shapefile data of Escambia County, Florida Interstates, Florida Major City Locations, and Major Florida Rivers. Since we only wanted the data specifically within Escambia County, the  CLIP tool in ArcGIS Pro was used to clip all these data to the Escambia county boundary shapefile, like a cookie cutter. In this case, our final "cookie" is shaped like Escambia County and decorated with cities, interstates, rivers, and the UWF main campus location. Yum!

Symbology: 

Cartography often uses symbology to convey information. To start with, choosing symbology that the viewer can recognize is helpful. Water is usually shown as blue in most maps, so the rivers were changed to blue. The main focus was the location of the UWF Main Campus, so the point was changed to a large red star, which draws attention and can be separated from the city locations, shown as black points. The goal was to make this the first map feature to draw the viewer's eye, after the reading the title, which was placed at the top in large, bold font. The same color was used for the county location within the index map and for the interstates. Escambia county was set to be a light yellow, to contrast with the other counties, shown as gray, but not draw too much attention away from the UWF Main Campus point location. 

Map Layout: 

This lab was also all about the layout of the map itself.  When making a map, the map creator, aka the cartographer, must choose the best layout for the map that is both visually pleasing and also provides all the necessary info to use the map correctly. The required map features were also included, but at the bottom or off to the side so that they are not distracting from the main map:

• Title
• Scale 
• Legend
• North Arrow
• Border
• Date
• Data Source
• Cartographer Name

This was the first map in this course to include a legend, shown in the bottom right, and an inset map, shown in the top left.