This exercise required us to create a map displaying increases or decreases in jobs in each US state. We used proportional symbols to do this, and converted our Legend to a graphic in order to gain more flexibility with it's design. The most important part was separating the color from the symbols in the Legend, since they were representing either negative or positive integers. To compensate for this, I designed the colors I used as separate elements and regrouped them with my Legend to make it look smooth. For the symbols themselves, I toggled on the Appearance Compensation and found a good starting size for the symbols. The result is below:
Although this map looks very simple (which I really like about this map considering how much information it is communicating), it took a little effort to separate all the elements as necessary in order to characterize them accordingly, create the nested Legend, and even more patience to match up other settings as I forgot that they were no longer connected. The background appears to be most obvious element where I struggled with this, because now that I have finished my maps I am noticing that the shade is slightly off, which is likely to be the transparency settling since I saved the color for use multiple times (in anticipation of this problem). That's the thing about cartography - there is always one more detail that could be improved!
For the next exercise, we made a bivariate choropleth map to compare the relationship between physical inactivity and obesity in the United States by county. We "made" and used our own colors, starting with the choice of two complementary colors. I used purple for obesity, yellow for physical inactivity, and orange hues represented values between them to help viewers visually associate them geographically. Then, I made the legend a graphic so I could reinvent how I wanted it to look, which in this case I used arrows and labels to show how the darker shades symbolize the higher percentages, and the light shades the lower percentages. This map makes it easier to see how these two variables correlate with each other better than most graphs, as seen below:
For the next exercise, we made a bivariate choropleth map to compare the relationship between physical inactivity and obesity in the United States by county. We "made" and used our own colors, starting with the choice of two complementary colors. I used purple for obesity, yellow for physical inactivity, and orange hues represented values between them to help viewers visually associate them geographically. Then, I made the legend a graphic so I could reinvent how I wanted it to look, which in this case I used arrows and labels to show how the darker shades symbolize the higher percentages, and the light shades the lower percentages. This map makes it easier to see how these two variables correlate with each other better than most graphs, as seen below:
That wraps up this semester's assignments, but stay tuned for the upcoming Final Project Map!
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