Lab 7

This is my rendition of Lab 7. I didn't do as bad as the others and my confidence is building. To me it's easy to read and not too much dead space. The scale was tricky because the difference between the smallest and largest numbers was large and so the smallest symbol is almost too small and the largest symbol is almost too big for the county. Next Lab.

Map Find - Proportional Symbol

This is a proportional symbol map i found on a Penn State geography website. I picked it because it looks like something I would do, but it's on a Geography 485 masters level class site. I should not be allowed to judge maps, but I can say this one is about as striped down as you can get. It makes me wonder why they picks to show and attached to a 485 class. I did a google search and found hundreds of examples, none more drab than this.

Lab 6

Lab 6 was easy on layout and content, but difficult on picking colors that print well. I thought the digital copy was pretty good. Everything is legible and there is no banding in the gradient. However when I printed it it looks poor. I tried 3 different shades of green and orange and something about it just looked bad. Over saturated and banding were my biggest problem. I'm over it. Next Lab

Map Find - Color

Found this color map on a image design blog by Michael Doret. Our task was to find a color map. The assignment might of had more to in that that, but I found this one after a quick google search and i decided i was done looking. It gets more interesting the longer you look at it.

Map Find 5 - Choropleth

This is the most unique choropleth map I could find. I found it on a political blog by Charles Apple. For the most part I'm politically apathetic, but I liked the raster look and you can still see a warped shape of the US. Political maps are starting to pop up in the news and to me they all look the same. This one actually caught my eye and made me stop and look.

Lab 5

I was not thrilled with the way these turned out. I was not sure what to do with the legend and how to fit all that cash in the empty space, but the color ramp turned out nice and I can see 5 different shades of grey fairly easily. Alaska and Hawaii are where I put them because this looks best to me... no other reason.

Lab 4

Lab 4 gave me fits with the banding. The other difficult part is trying to design something that looks nice when working with the most basic layers. On a good note, I am getting better with illustrator. 6 more labs to go.