18 replies to this topic

[Nick Springer]

I certainly hate to redraw a boundary or river that I've drawn several times before, Nick, but I just can't accept a world without Béziér curves.

I concur which is why I have never actually used GIS to trace. Actually, my new best friend is a Wacom tablet.

[MapMedia]

Dennis, maybe I should have used in my comment to you, because I agree with your point and am always eager to improve.

To clarify, for this project, GIS was used for a small fraction of front-end work to draw state boundaries, rivers, and help out with the hillshade, but the lions share of the project is done in Illustrator, where I have introduce Bezier curves, redrawn some rivers, etc. I think your point is that the GIS data I chose was too complex, a backhoe, where the job called for less detail and complexity? Though I feel hand drawing 20 US state polygons by hand, plus rivers, etc. could and maybe should be drawn by hand in this instance, but I think when you see the revision, not many will notice a significant difference between the two (?).

[razornole]

Hello Chris,

What jumps out at me right away is that your figure ground relief is off with your West Virginia map. Humans tend to perceive lighter object as closer and darker objects as further away. Here your WV map is dark and the other states are light. It almost seems like a lake/waterbody to me. I can't say that I am fan of the hillshade, not because it looks bad (it looks great) but it isn't necessary. It is a map of lock and dams, not the geomorphology of WV. Without the hillshade you could easily label the locks right on your map and get rid of the locational codicil and those eye-popping circles altogether.
Not sure if someone else covered this but your Ohio et al. rivers in Penn. are black, and not grey like your other rivers.

Consistency seems to be a major issue with the eastern 1/3 of the US. Why use postal codes, abbreviations, and the full state names? To me you are implying that New York is more important than Connecticut, there's plenty of space in the Atlantic. Mixing font families is a distracting element that doesn't need to be; serif fonts are associated as classical/elegance & san-serif are modern/contemporary. This is a historical atlas I would stick with serif fonts.
Not sure why the rivers are listed in WV, the leaders don't appear to point to anything.
Finally, make the Virginia territory "pop" by making it the lightest (almost white) grey, surrounding states (New England) darker, the Midwest darker, and your water bodies the darkest. The human eye can easily distinguish 5 shades of grey. That way you could eliminate the distracting black line.

Sorry to come across harsh, I tend to vet hard.

Kristian

[MapMedia]

Thank you Kristian for getting this thread back on track and for the very useful comments / suggestions.
Some elements of this project have been requested by the client, such as fonts and relief, so I tried to accommodate as best I could. In terms of the shading, increasing the POP factor, I have taken your suggestion and believe it has a good effect, especially for Map2. Thanks again!