Brooke's GIS Blog

 The objectives of this week's lab focused on creating contours from a DEM, applying labeling techniques using a mask, comparing hillshade techniques and using hillshading to create maps. This lab was of particular interest to me, because the other day at work, I was creating a basemap to use in maps of St. Johns County and wanted to add some topographical features to give the basemap some dimension, but struggled with how to do it. Well, now I know! I think another useful technique learned in this lab was using variable depth masking for creating labels. I'm eager to learn other ways I can apply this technique when creating maps.

I chose to use the USA Contiguous Lamber Conformal Conic coordinate system for the State of Ohio. I had chosen this one over coordinate systems that I compared like WGS 1984 UTM Zone 18N and NAD 1983 StatePlane Ohio North and NAD 1983 StatePlane Ohio South. The reason I chose the USA Contiguous Lamber Conformal Conic System was because I felt it best represented Ohio as a whole, rather than Northern or Southern Ohio.

The objectives of this week's lab were focused on cartographic design in ArcGIS Pro, applying map design principles, explaining design choices based on an audience, and applying different typographic styles, including placement, to achieve legibility, visual contrast and hierarchy. Looking the attached map, I believe I achieved the five map design principles represented in my map.  Map one: I addressed the map principles of figure-ground organization and visual contrast by choosing a darker color to represent Travis County, and brighter, lighter colors to represent the individual layers. I achieved legibility by choosing a legible font in black text, and sticking with the same font/color for the entire map. Lastly, I achieved hierarchical organization and balance by placing the features like recreation centers on top of features like the County, water bodies and roads, which centering Travis County with a landscape template in the center of the paper. Map three: I used text (type, ...