Cartographic Skills - Module 2

Module 2 - Introduction to Graphic Design with Adobe Illustrator

This week's lesson was an introduction to Adobe Illustrator.  It was a very difficult assignment for me.  I started out in ArcGIS with a very basic map then added just a few elements before exporting it to an Adobe Illustrator (AI) file.  This is the map I imported into AI.

And everything went downhill from there.  AI was not at all intuitive for me.  I had a difficult time finding everything I was looking for, starting with the layer panel.  I kept bouncing back and forth between the lecture video and the assignment directions and missing things on both ends.  It took me a while to figure out how to separate out the different elements of the scale bar, north arrow and legend.  But even after finally getting that I never did make a good selection on the neatline.  I think there were two and I deleted both.  I tried a few times to replace it with a rectangular box, but never could get that to go in right.  This kept me from being able to change my background color.  I don't know if it would have helped if I knew what a neatline is, but I am now determine to figure that out.

Running the script was very simple, particularly since the problems had been raised on the discussion board and very clear explanations were given on how to proceed.  Once I had that done I easily found the three state symbols I wanted to use, but never did figure out how to import them.  The only way I could figure out how to save the image was to a jpeg file and it wouldn't let me import or clip and paste that.

Finally at this point I realized I was going to have to make a decision between turning my assignment in late and falling behind on my next assignment, or turning it in incomplete and keep scrambling to get ahead so I'm not working on future assignments on the last day.  Since my schedule isn't due to let up for another week I decided to take the hit on this assignment in the hopes of getting caught up before the next one is due.

So I zoomed out to take another look at the map before exporting it to a .jpg file and found another problem.

Somehow, during the course of my internal debate, Florida developed what appears to be a chain of islands off her eastern shore.  Apparently I managed to moved the water without moving the rest of the map with it.  I couldn't have done that if I had tried, so I don't know how I did it without even being aware of doing it.  But I'm looking forward to figuring it out once I have to time to go back and look at it.