2 replies to this topic

[apels]

Hello,
I'm a geography student from Latvia. I always enjoyed making maps throughout the studies and hopefully one day I'll find a way to make a living doing this.

So this is one of the several maps I made for my bachelor thesis. I would like to hear your thoughts about it.
It's a simple population map, main emphasis is on the distribution of population. As it's an academic paper I sticked to pale colors, I showed County names, road networks and small towns for additional information.
I used ArcMap 10 for this and Corel photo-paint for some design touches (watershed border mostly).

I already know some faults in the work (I ran out of time) - no need for county labels outside the watershed, watershed border is not entirely precise.

Let me know your thoughts.

Attached Files

•  iedzivotaju_skaits.png   646.53K   141 downloads

[mapfax]

Hello,
I'm a geography student from Latvia. I always enjoyed making maps throughout the studies and hopefully one day I'll find a way to make a living doing this.

So this is one of the several maps I made for my bachelor thesis. I would like to hear your thoughts about it.
It's a simple population map, main emphasis is on the distribution of population. As it's an academic paper I sticked to pale colors, I showed County names, road networks and small towns for additional information.
I used ArcMap 10 for this and Corel photo-paint for some design touches (watershed border mostly).

I already know some faults in the work (I ran out of time) - no need for county labels outside the watershed, watershed border is not entirely precise.

Let me know your thoughts.

This looks like a good effort. My major comment is that there are too many color classes for population. It is hard to tell some of the colors apart, so perhaps 5 color classes would be better than the current 8. Also, Engures Ezers (Lake) should show as blue (water color); population color classes should not cover the lake because people generally do not live on lakes. Finally, the graphic scale could be smaller.

Edited by frax, 03 June 2012 - 03:00 PM.
fixed the quote tags...

[DaveB]

Something I see on a lot of maps - I'm not sure you even need the scale bar or north arrow, but if you do it might help to put more thought into their design and placement on the map. As they stand they look more like afterthoughts, something thrown on ("because all maps should have them"?).

It seems odd to me that there are roads (I think they're roads, the brown/orangish lines) inside the area of interest, but not outside, while other features, like cities and boundary lines, exist both inside and outside.