Emily McRae's GIS Blog

This is  map of Yellowstone National Park with traditional hillshade and a hand-picked thematic color scheme to represent tree cover type. The colors I selected were shades of greens and browns to represent tree types, grey for non-forested areas, and blue for water. These are all very natural colors, except for grey, which was selected to divert the eye from this area as it does not contain pertinent information to one interested in specific tree type.  A traditional hillshade was selected instead of a multidirectional hillshade because this option puts a heavy emphasis on shaded areas, making relief more detectable at a small scale. A heavy transparency (of 37% for forested areas and more for non-forested and water) was placed on the foliage type layer to make the terrain features more visible through the color.

Nunavut Territory of Canada I selected the territory of Nunavut. This area is fairly mid-sized (bigger than a state/city but smaller than a continent), which spans predominantly North and South, and is made up of many small islands that stretch up almost to the pole.  Because this is a midlatitude region that doesn’t quite reach a pole, a conic projection is a good choice as it is pretty versatile and can be adjusted to work for different areas. Canada Albers Equal Area Conic is specifically made for regions in Canada, which the standard parallels adjusted for the region. Because this region is so far North, I wanted to ensure that the area was not distorted and stretched as is the case for many other projections. This projection will preserve the area and will not greatly distort the shape. Nunavut did not fit well within a UTM or a state plane so those options were not available. While the Lambert Conformal conic, another widely used conic projection that is conformal, was an op

San Francisco Bay Area, Points of Interest Because this is a general reference map for public use, I opted for many preset font options available in ArcGIS Pro. This included default text options for water, sized appropriately for the significance of the body of water. The labels were placed on a bend to mimic the flow of the water and the shape of the shorelines. For land formations or parks, another preset font option was chose, the land formation option. Again, the text was placed on a curve to mimic the curve of the land feature being labeled. The font type for features that are populated places was also a font preset, the Populated Places option. Some resizing was done to make the label for San Francisco stand out from the other labels. The label for the bridge was also labeled using the populated places option, but sized smaller to fit along the narrow bridge. A couple callouts were used where the available land area was coastal and also too small to hold a label. The use o

Recreation in Austin, TX An explanation of how the 5 map design principles were applied in the making of this map: Visual contrast was considered in my design in terms of colors selected for the map symbols and the effects added to them. The background was a pale color while the symbols are brighter and more vibrant to draw the eye. The push pins needed some outlines to make these elements standout from each other. Legibility was considered in the text as well as the actual map. I made the map large so no small areas or clusters would be difficult to distinguish at all. The text size was all made well above the recommended minimum viewing criteria or 4 points for a printed map. Microsoft Sans Serif was used for all text because it is plain and easy to read. Keeping all text the same provided uniformity and no text was small enough to warrant serifs. Figure-ground orientation was not a huge issue here because there was no shading or any other complex elements that might confus