Week 4 Lab: Typography

      Cartography is definitely an art, and this week we focused on one aspect, typography.  With a base map of a portion of the Florida Keys centered around Marathon, we were asked to locate and label a list of geographic places, then complete the map with the usual required elements.  At the same time, we were asked to incorporate what we had learned about typography from Chapter 11 in the text, and from the lecture and tutorial material provided.
      After giving my map a horizontal orientation to match the lateral spread of the Keys, I went online and found all the required places, then made rough labels for each.  I focused on one category at a time, starting with the Keys, then cities, then the three specialized places (airport, park, and country club), and finally the bodies of water.  With each step, I tried to think of how to use font, size and positioning to make clear labels.  The airport, park and country club each got appropriate standard symbols, while the cities had traditional circle symbols.  I tried to be careful not to overlay labels on top of land.  When necessary, I used short lines to connect labels to their locations on the map.  The most challenging part of labeling was learning to get text to follow a path.  It does look nice when the water label follows the contours of the coastline.
      The last several hours were spent finding an appropriate map for the insert.  I kept on finding .gifs or  bitmaps, and all the .jpgs I found were too small so the pixels were enormous and the map was fuzzy.  Finally I got one, and once settled in the corner, it looked good, balanced against the Legend in the diagonal corner.
      I chose a dark blue background, and made the Keys stand out in a light grey-pinkish color.  Learning how to use fill was not easy at first, but I got the hang of it finally. 
      This week's lab was good practice at using CorelDraw, and at using graphic design elements to produce a basic, useful map.
      Seeing the map here, I guess I needed another border around the page.  This isn't what it looked like when I saw it in Paint.  There is room for improvement, but I'm still proud of my efforts, given my extremely limited previous experience in graphic design.