Week 4 - Typography

View of Marathon, FL

This week's lab for GIS 3015 covered typography, hence the text heavy map shown above. Some of the objectives for this week included a map with at least 3 specially created elements or effects, and 17 labels for 17 features, all following proper typographic style rules.

Technical details

The map was created primarily with CorelDraw X7. Certain elements had been added from elsewhere (the inset map from Florida Scenic Highways, the islands from UWF provided data, and the majority of the 'Local Attractions' symbols from ESRI ArcMap) but the rest were created by me. That includes the little sand dollar figures in each of the map corners... yes, I had some fun with Corel!

My approach to this map was to treat it as if it were a general tourist guide map. Ideally, this map would have also had the highway on it, but nothing is perfect. Since the majority of the view is of the ocean, I decided to play up the beach theme - hence the sand dollars in the corners. The corners of my original neat line were scalloped to accommodate the oft mentioned sand dollar figures (created with a series of ellipses and the smoothing tool), and the interior map fill was modified using an elliptical fountain fill. I also managed to get the extrude tool to work this time around, and that was used to modify the star symbols for the cities.

Two text fonts used - the Arial type family for the water features, and the Bell MT type family for everything else. The water features are the only text that I used different colors with, as well as kerning and the text on a path technique. The key features I labelled with a rectangular highlighted background - this may not have been strictly necessary, but it seemed like the text was getting lost out at sea! Hence the highlighted background. The cities were labelled with a bold typeface, and are the second largest size type on the map, outside of the map title. The symbolized attractions were not labelled directly - for those I felt a legend would suffice, and would also help de-clutter the map view.

Coming full circle...

Overall I'd say that this CorelDraw experience was much easier for me than the last time around (see Week 2). I think part of it was that I wasn't trying to directly import an .eps file with various symbols on it. CorelDraw may be a fickle program, but once you get the hang of it it's not so bad!