Week 6 - Choropleth Mapping

The first map gave me problems until I realized how to get the projection to change the distortion of the map. Also, I discovered the Rotate Data Frame Tool ... nice. The one thing I am still frustrated with is that I still haven't successfully clipped a data frame to a shape (circle) yet ... argh!! I chose to modify the class breaks ... I wanted to distiguish between the states that had decreased and the rest ...

The next map went rather quick ... did all in Illustrator ... I took the liberty to adjust the class breaks again in order to better demonstrate the data and create a more astetically pleasing map ...

Week 5 Deliverable - South Florida Study Area

This map provided an opportunity to experiment with some features. I chose the Gaussian blur outside to distiguish between the Figure-ground. I cut the scale in half because I determined that once I had enlarged the primary map element, the previous version of the scale was to large. I chose not to change the colors and instead at the county labels to focus attention to the counties of interest first, then what the ratio is, instead of the reverse.

Week Four Deliverable - Middle Keys

Adobe Illustator ... I found this exercise pretty straight forward, with just a little difficulty with the text scaling. I have used Illustrator quite extensively in the past, just not for making maps. Typically I have use AutoCad for such endeavors, however Illustrator does offer much better graphics capabilities. I think that the single most helpful tip I could offer is, use the layers. Learn to logically name them and organize them. Placing vectors on certain layers then locking them prevents misques.

Week Three Deliverable - Escambia Census Exercise

This map is a compilation of four different methods of analizing the stastical data from the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau. The challenge I faced was with the the Standard Deviation method. I attempted to create five classification to no avail.



The method I chose as to display my analysis of the data was the Equal Interval method. I feel that this method most clearly demonstrates the ratio of African American residents across Escambia county. Several of the other methods, I felt presented a skew of the data by either indicating a wider or narrower distribution of the residents.