This week we
further explored map design by practicing typography. The assignment was
to place various labels around Marathon Key, Florida. Some of the labels
presented challenges that required decisions to be made about placement. That
is, there are optimal places for labels to go when they are to accompany a
symbol. With this in mind, the small area of the land mass of Marathon required
me to make some decisions and bend some cartographic typography rules. There are two labels, one for a key (Duck Key) and a
country club (Sombrero Country Club) , that overlay the border of the key with
the ocean. I chose to place them here because neither a mask (either around the
letters or as a text fill background) nor a leading line looked proper. In the
case of the text mask, the size of the type was too small for it to even be
made out and created more confusion than it was worth. In creating a background
fill for the text it obscured the geographic features even more than leaving
the plain text. I thought to include leader lines but they looked distracting
and out of place. I tried to keep with the general pattern of the rest of the
labels. Thus, I chose to keep their placement despite their overlap and slight clarity
issues (technically, overprinting). I feel the labels look much more uniform
and harmonious despite some overprinting.
When labeling the
water features I used italics and colored the text blue to easily differentiate
it from the other labels. For two of the water features I broke the general
rule to keep type horizontal. In the case of Boot Key Harbor (southwestern
portion of the map), it is such a small area that I decided to follow the curve
of the water feature with the label. I did the same with Vaca Key Bight to
avoid overlap with the country club label. For the key (island) labels I chose
to use all uppercase letters to distinguish them as areal entities as opposed
to simply place names (like a city or public place).
I made use of
the skills I learned in last week’s cartographic design lab in composing the
remaining elements of this assignment. The title and inset balance each other
on a diagonal from the top left to the bottom right. This is logical as we not
only read left to right but these elements fill the empty space Marathon does
not fill. I chose a color scheme that adequately creates contrast and contributes
to proper figure-ground relationships. I employed drop shadows and gradient fills to create a visual hierarchy by emphasizing the small geographic area of Marathon and weighting the thematic symbols.
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| Map of Marthon Key, Florida with particular keys, water features, cities, and facilities noted. This map helped to hone typographic skills in cartographic design. The small area of Marathon presented textual design challenges that I had to overcome. |
My map shows
Marathon Key, Florida with particular facilities, cities, water features, and keys
(islands) noted. It was entirely designed and altered within CorelDraw x7.
Essential tools were the Text tool for all of the labeling, various Shape tools
for thematic symbols and borders, and grouping objects. I enlarged the area of Marathon by grouping all the curves that comprised it. The map is not to scale and mentioned on the map itself. This re-sizing eventually created an issue when exporting my map. After some head scratching I realized this was due to the fact that the frame of Marathon extended beyond the page dimensions. As a result, it looked like I had a white matte to the right and the left of the map. To fix this I cropped the image in MS Paint. This map was a great exercise for learning to implement the rules of typography as they apply to cartographic design.
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