Lab #7: Surf’s Up in Nosara

Nosara is a popular tourist destination in the Central American country of Costa Rica.  In this lab I was asked to redesign a map of Nosara aiming to appeal to American surfers and to include only 10 point features.  I thank Michigan State University and Nosara Travel & Rentals for this map.

Here’s the original map:

Original Map (PDF)

And here’s the map I made:

Revised Map (PDF)

As you can see I made some changes. Two of the point features I chose for the lab are not on the original map.  I located them on Google Maps after reading about them on TripAdvisor.  I also visited the websites of all of these point features (except the “Gas Station”) as well as many of the places that didn’t make the cut.

I also excluded some of the polygons.  I determined that American surfers aren’t likely to need to know where the school is or FUCAN (which I discovered is a local trade school).  I also decided that the “Library” and “Soccer Field” features were unnecessary.  I kept the clinic, the police station, the post office, and the bus station as these features seemed more important to an American tourist.

I also removed “Nosara Travel”.  Not that it’s not a good feature, but it’s just not a good polygon feature, and being limited to 10 point features it just didn’t make the cut.

I made some changes to the roads based on what I saw on Google Maps.  For instance “EBAIS/Health Clinic” is south of a road in Google Maps so I made it so in my map.  I also noticed the road past the bridge over “Rio Nosara” branched into two directions and so included that on the map.

This was the final lab.  Hope you have enjoyed this blog!

You will most likely see me again once I have something interesting and cartography-related to blog about.  Or maybe I will start another blog and then I will make a post on here telling you where you can read my new blog.

Thank you all.

Lab #6: Michigan Map With Adobe Illustrator

With the help of Adobe Illustrator I have touched up the map in last week’s post.

Hope you enjoy this map even more than the last edition.

Click to view the PDF: Road, Bus, and Rail in Michigan (2nd Edition).

There is a slight black outline around all of the colored text and also around the associated text in the legend. This helps to improve the contrast with the background and with the highways.

I also adjusted the kerning and leading in the text.  For some I reduced kerning and leading to reduce clutter.  For others I found that increasing kerning helped make it easier to position the text so as to avoid obscuring too much of the highways.

Another thing I introduced was a faint gray outline around the state of Michigan.  This was difficult to do in ArcMap because the map of the state is derived from a layer that initially displayed counties, and so any outline would’ve also shown boundaries of the counties.  This would have distracted from the main purpose of the map.  In Adobe Illustrator I used the Pathfinder window to merge the shapes of the counties together into a single shape and then applied the outline.

Lab #5: Michigan Map with ArcMap

For this lab I was to create a map of Michigan intended for tourists to be read at highway rest stops.

One thing that can be a big help if you’re a tourist is to know your traveling options.  As this is just a map of Michigan I included only land transportation, no airplanes or ferries.

I titled it: Road, Bus, and Rail in Michigan (click link to view PDF).  The map differentiates cities based on whether or not they have Amtrak Stations and whether they are bus or rail.  It also includes the highways.  You’ll notice that for the symbols I used differences in hue as well as lightness to show which cities had bus (lighter green) or rail (darker red) stations.  The difference in lightness would help colorblind readers tell the difference between cities with bus stations and rail stations.  I bolded the text for bus and rail station cities for the sake of emphasis as well as making them a darker shade of green and red respectively both for emphasis and to associate the text clearly with the symbols.  I also put the state capital, “Lansing” in bold for the sake of emphasis.  It lacks a station, but since the capital and other cities without stations are all in black the contrast in color should prevent readers from getting confused.  Another thing I did with color to help with reading the map is that the Amtrak railroads are in red to create a clear association with the color of the stations.

I had to do a great deal of compromising with how to position the text.  ArcMap is a useful tool, but it is not as flexible of a tool in handling text.  There is quite a bit of kerning and leading that would have improved the readability of the text.  In the next lab I will edit this map further in Adobe Illustrator.