Typography: Overview of the State of Florida

 

Today I want to talk about Typography and how it relates to Cartographic principles. The map displayed above is an overview of the state of Florida. 

The capital city, main cities, rivers, lakes, and swampland are displayed above. 

So how does this map represent the state of Florida in regards to Typography?

Typography is the font, color scheme, theme, and overall display of a map. Therefore, I used a neutral gray themed background, with the dark canvas base map, gray headers, black font, and light gray canvas inset map as an overview of the state. I felt as if this color scheme really highlighted the main cities and water features I wanted to display on my map with bright colors. The green capital star, the red cities, and blue water ways really standout and highlight the main objective of the map. As you can see, the labels are easy to read as well. I used italics for the water areas such as the labels on the rivers. 

With expression queries, I wanted to identify and label only the fields indicated for main populated areas or areas of significance such as swamps, lakes, and river labels depicted above. I also added the UWF logo and went with a dark clear color scheme with bright accent colors. I used a darker blue tone for the lakes and swamps. I used red for cities, with a bright green star for the capital.  I also converted multiple annotations from labels to move text around the map. For fonts, I used river labels  with italics such as Bodoni MT and Calibri for my main text fields which has an easy to read feel but is also more structured. 

In Typography and Cartography, the main map essential elements are crucial to having a informative map that "makes sense" and provides spatial reference to a viewer. The map essential elements I used were two scale bars, a legend with feature counts, a title, a north arrow, and an inset map of the state of Florida.

Got to have a title!

So, give me some feedback! Please comment below. 

• Do you like the theme of my map?
• Do you like the fonts I used, text size, and text color?
• Do you the color of my data point layers and polygons? What about my neutral dark and gray theme to highlight the bright colors?
• Do you like my title, map elements, and the logo placement?
• Lastly, does my map make sense? Do you have a feel for the spatial reference of the state of Florida, it's main cities, and rivers / water features?