This week's GIS lab focused on cartography. While working in ArcMap refining skills already learned, three maps of Mexico were created focusing on population by states, transportation in Central Mexico, and topography of the country. Additional experience with ArcCatalog was gained during this lab, so I am starting to feel more comfortable with the different ways to navigate to information for maps or for metadata. Raster pyramids were introduced in preparation for generating the topography map, and creating subsets of data were explored using SQL queries. I learned by error to keep my layers informed of any changes to filepaths. It's no fun seeing that angry red exclamation point when a file is opened! I spent a lot of time checking out other maps to help me decide appropriate color schemes that would clearly depict what I was trying to communicate with each map. Through experimenting by adventurously clicking on buttons to see what would result (something I was formerly loathe to do), I have stumbled across many things such as masking, shadowing, etc. that I like to include in my maps for clarification purposes or aesthetics. At times this has caused some disastrous results, so I save my work as soon as I get to the next satisfactory result in my progress.
Annotations and dynamic text are things that I need to work with more before I really have them down. Adjusting information within a legend was a bit troublesome to me while trying to line up columns or adjust spacing and so on. With additional labs I anticipate that this will become secondhand. For each map I chose a title that would clearly identify my contract (populations, transportation, and topography of Mexico) with the end user. Throughout the lab I sometimes stayed with recommendations of color, placement, etc., while other times I felt justified in straying from the path. One example is the roads on the transportation map. Resources recommend red for identifying roads, but the red seemed too overwhelming on the map even when I reduced the line width. However, I was able to mute the red a bit in the color palette which had better results in my opinion. Having an idea early on of what my map should look like, but not yet having the skills to execute it was a bit frustrating. I know that it will come with time! With each lab I feel more and more confident about the skills I am learning and the product which results from the hard work. I found this lab to be especially enjoyable.
Annotations and dynamic text are things that I need to work with more before I really have them down. Adjusting information within a legend was a bit troublesome to me while trying to line up columns or adjust spacing and so on. With additional labs I anticipate that this will become secondhand. For each map I chose a title that would clearly identify my contract (populations, transportation, and topography of Mexico) with the end user. Throughout the lab I sometimes stayed with recommendations of color, placement, etc., while other times I felt justified in straying from the path. One example is the roads on the transportation map. Resources recommend red for identifying roads, but the red seemed too overwhelming on the map even when I reduced the line width. However, I was able to mute the red a bit in the color palette which had better results in my opinion. Having an idea early on of what my map should look like, but not yet having the skills to execute it was a bit frustrating. I know that it will come with time! With each lab I feel more and more confident about the skills I am learning and the product which results from the hard work. I found this lab to be especially enjoyable.
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Map 1 depicts Mexico’s states, ranking them by population.
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Map 2 depicts primary transportation routes (rail, highways,
rivers)
in central Mexico.
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Map 3 depicts Mexico’s topography.
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