Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Lab 4 GIS3015: Typography & Labels

This week, our assignment was to label a map of Marathon, FL, with cities, water bodies, and a few local attractions. The main thrust was to use Corel Draw and ensure we placed labels appropriately using the guidance from Gestalt Principles (Cartographic Design), the Prezi presentation and "Map Elements and Typography" from our course book. There was allot to cover this week - I did not know that there was so much to learn about Typography, but nonetheless, the presentation and movie clips were all interesting.

I started with the data provided; Florida Key .cdr file. Using Corel Draw, I Googled the Keys, Water Bodies, Cities, and Parks & City Features, we were assigned to Label: 17 features in all-- though I must admit, while I was completing this lab, it seemed like there were many more items than just 17.  The challenge was that this land feature, Marathon Key, is so narrow that almost anything you label will be on both land and over the water; not an ideal situation. Still, it was fun finding icons to import to help me depict the cities and other land features. I used Red Dots for the cities and a sombrero for the country club.  I also used different colors to depict cities, land features, and water. I used green for the land features, such as Sombrero Country Club and Marathon Airport; blue for water such as Tom's Harbor and Florida Bay and; red for the city names.   Lastly, I used a “fun font” to tie the water location with the title of the map: I used Curlz MT Font for both “Florida Bay” and the title “Marathon Key. I felt this was a subtle, but fun way to link the two items using typography. I did experience one difficulty: Exporting my map.  Though I had a border and plenty of room around the edge of my map when I viewed it in Print Preview, when I exported it as a jpg, the edge was very close to my title and the northeast corner of Marathon Key was nipped. To remedy this, I took a screen shot (Print Scr) and opened this image in Corel Paint Shop Pro on my desktop. I was able to crop the screen edges and save the image you see below.  I still don't know why the Export feature of Corel Draw did this to me but maybe other's had a similar experience?    

Overall this was a difficult lab because so much had to be done manually and adjusted one nudge at a time--at least, that's how I did it. Still, I enjoyed this lab and learned a great deal about typography.  Enjoy my map below.



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