Mod 3 - Typography

This week's lesson was on Typography.  The lesson was put to use by labeling various features on a map of Marathon, Fl using typographic principles.

I started out in ArcMap importing a map of Florida counties from last week's lesson and zooming in to focus on the Marathon portion of the Florida Keys.  Since Marathon stretches mostly east to west I changed my layout to landscape to zoom in as close as possible.   I added a second data frame to show all of the Keys and the southern portion of Florida so the location of Marathon could be put in perspective.  Other than that the only other thing I added in ArcMap was a scale bar.  I then exported my file to an Adobe Illustrator (AI) file.  I went to work in AI and did this:

Map of Marathon in the Florida Keys.                         

The map imported into AI was very sparse.  The first thing I did was sort out my layers and get them cleaned and straightened out. This was important because I had a scale bar in my drawing and needed to associate that with my landmass so they would stay in sync through zooming and re-sizing.  Once I did that, I changed my orientation from portrait to landscape to get the best view of my image.


The next thing I tried to do was add a background cover and that's when I figured out I had deleted my neatline again.  Fortunately I had just received my assessment for last week's assignment and the fix was mentioned in that so I was able to correct this error by inserting a rectangle.  With the rectangle in place I was able to add the background and also a decorative border.  The border provided my first customization feature.

After that I spent a bit of time figuring out the how I wanted to display my text.  I knew I needed different colors for the water and land and decided to go with a different style as well, though the water labels would also be italicized.  Then I needed to figure out the hierarchy for text size.  One of the complications here was the fact that Marathon actually spans several keys.  Going from largest to smallest it seemed the Keys should have had a larger text than a city, but the city encompasses several Keys.  It was proving to be a bit of a dilemma until I recalled the focus of the map was supposed to be Marathon and so its size combined with its importance settled the matter and I made Marathon's text the larger.

I had a couple false starts adding the text.  I thought once I selected a color from the color palette it would stay that color until I changed it.  There may be a way to cause it to do that, but if there is I haven't figured that out yet.  Every time I entered a new string of text I had to select the color again.  There are several different ways the colors come up and it seemed every time I tried to select the color it came up differently and I was having a hard time selecting the same color from among the various similar shades.  Eventually I realized since I had set my layers up so well I could just add the text in whatever color it came up then, when I was done, select them all by layer and change it all to the same color.  After I figured that out I also figure out how to save a color I had already used on a separate palette to be more easily selected when I wanted it.

I chose to use thematic symbols for my points of interest such as the state park because I like how they stand out in a sea of text and make obvious to the viewer what they represent with just a quick glance.  It wasn't until afterward that I realized I had my second customization feature.  I wasn't real happy with the symbol I selected for the country club.  I didn't think it stood out enough but I had made so much progress learning so many things in AI, I decided to wait until another time to figure out how to import an outside image.

For my third feature customization I had wanted to add halos to some of my text but I never could figure out how to do that.  I'm still not sure if that has to be done as the text is being added or if it's something that gets done to selected text.  While I was looking through the tool bars trying to figure that out I found the Drop Shadow feature under Effect>Stylize and decided to try that to see what it would do.  I selected my map title for this experiment an decided I liked it.

This week's assignment went much more smoothly for me.  I had a lot more time to explore AI and figure things out and that helped a lot.  There are still a lot of things that just don't make sense to me, but I'm learning.  I do find it to be much more cumbersome to use than Autocad or ArcMap, but I'm hoping once I'm more familiar with it things will start to make more sense.