Mod 4 - Cartographic Design

This week's assignment was to create a map featuring the schools of Ward 7 of Washington D.C. in ArcMap using Gestalt's Principles.  This lab was pretty fun.  It started with data obtained from District of Columbia Open Data being imported to a new map with Arc Map.  From there it was a

A map of the schools of Washington D.C.'s Ward 7 using
the Principles of Gestalt

matter of manipulating the layers so everything would show properly and turning off anything that was just plain clutter.  This required employing the Gestalt Principles.

I kept all the background clutter to a minimum by shutting off layers that did not emphasize the theme of the map.  After that I applied contrast to emphasize the area of interest by darkening the background of 7th Ward and lightening the background of the surrounding area.

Then I used visual hierarchy to emphasize the schools by breaking the schools down into three categories and sizing them by rank so a quick glance would indicate a difference.

Next I employed Figure Ground Distinction by lightening the lightening the roads in the background so the symbols would stand out more clearly.

After this was all set up I went into the Neighborhoods attribute table and selected several neighborhood names to display and created a new layer of this selection.  In order to move them around into more appropriate positions I converted the labels to annotations.  I had a bit of a problem with this step.  The conversion process appeared to work, but for some reason I was unable to move the text.  I could select it and change the font and size, but I couldn't move it.  After numerous failed attempts I just deleted the original selection layer and recreated it then ran the conversion again.  The second time worked fine.

Having my main map complete I switched to layout view and added another data frame for an inset map and set that up with very sparse information.  Once that was set I added all my map elements and shifted them around until my map felt balanced.  I exported to a .jpg file then saved my map and did a save as to another map and tried shifting it around to landscape view to see how that would look.  I didn't care for that as well.  I didn't feel it utilized the space as well as it did in portrait so I stuck with portrait.