Map of the Week

This week's focus was on type and how to use type effectively in cartography. I thought this map of Tokyo Disneyland provides an example of how different types and fonts can be used to catch the reader's eye while not making things confusing.

Lab 4: Typography

For this week's lab, I made a duplicate of another map, or rather another map's labels to be precise. This required much attention to detail and quite a bit of fiddling on Adobe Illustrator.

Time Zones

I got home today and was wondering if it was too late to call about an order I had made from a shop in California. So, I searched for a decent map of U.S. time zones and found this one. The boundaries and colors are easy to distinguish and the labels are done in a manner that allows the time zones to stand out as the primary focus of the map.

Lab 3

Here are my resulting efforts from lab 3. Compared to the previous lab's map, this may look a bit more like what one would envision as a traditional map, or at least a template for one.

Formula One Maps!

Here's a link that provides you motorsport fans with a tour of this year's Formula 1 circuits: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/circuit_guide/default.stm. Click on the red links on the world map and you'll be provided with a driver commentary while a red dot traces its way through the selected track.

Lab 2

Here is my map from our second lab exercise, which happens to be the first time I've made anything using Adobe Illustrator. The lines on the map represent various conceptions of the Earth's surface.

The three additional links I chose may seem like obvious choices for a geography blog, but it is for this very reason that I chose them. The CIA World Factbook is a quick way to get some good information on any country of interest, while the USGS site provides a great wealth of maps and satellite images. Lastly, considering the preponderance of hurricanes over the past few weeks, I figured it couldn't hurt to add the NOAA site so one can track approaching storms.