Cartographic Design

Module 4 – Cartographic Design

For this week’s assignment we had to use a geodatabase (gdb) for the Washington D.C. and the Ward 7 area schools using ArcMap 10.3.  In addition, for this assignment you needed to add locator insert map emphasizing the Ward 7 area.  In the main part of the map you gave less importance to the US highways, main roads, and local streets.

In this assignment after importing the necessary features like schools, surface water, roads and boundaries you adjusted the area to focus in on the Ward 7 area.  Once that was completed, you needed to decide on a color scheme. I used a website called Color Brewer http://colorbrewer2.org/  as it was suggested as part of the lab instructions. It was a great help for picking a color scheme and showing you the differences.   For this map, color, contrast and balance played a large part of the map but, you also had to emphasize the school districts in Ward 7 by school type elementary, middle, and high school.  And deemphasize other features like parks, highways and boundaries.  For this assignment you had to pay close attention to the lab instructions and make sure you picked the right color so that they did not stand out and take your attention from the Ward 7 area.