10 replies to this topic

[David Fletcher]

First off, thanks to everyone for your recommendations for my last map, they greatly improved the final product. Here is another map I am working on. It is one of a handful of base maps I am working on that will be overlaid with different retail layers. I'd love to hear your helpful criticisms.

Thanks!

 Utah_County_Base_Map_2.jpg   670.85K   250 downloads

[eli]

First off, I am a bit confused by the different colours... are the yellows and greens municipalities too?

[Dale Sanderson]

It's perfectly clear to me that yellow, green, and orange represent city limits. You might consider scaling those colors down, though, or even removing them entirely... if you're going to have some kind of retail icons all over the map, they'll tend to get lost a bit if they're on a distracting background of color. I'm not sure city limits are all that relevant to the purpose of this map. Also, I'd suggest going with a fill for BYU, rather than a line boundary.

[Gretchen Peterson]

You can leave off several of the legend items such as "highway" and "waterbody" because those are obvious, even to the lay map reader. I would probably change the colors a bit, something about that pink/peach doesn't grab me, but everyone has opinions about color. The lake label could be increased in size by a few points--maybe 4 pts larger--and perhaps try increasing the tracking just a bit, because a white label on a darker color is more legible when the letters are slightly farther apart. Overall I think this one is better than the last. Good improvement!

[Gretchen Peterson]

I should add that I'm quite fond of what you've done with the title. The black background, the little gray bar between the title box and the map, and the boldness of the "Base Map" are nice.

[David Fletcher]

Thanks for the advice Dale, Gretchen, and Eli. I made some minor changes based on your recommendations and am very happy with the effect they've had on the map. Also, I made a small change to the legend which I hope makes it more clear. Let me know what you think.

Here is a section of the map with one of the retail layers laid on top of it
 1.JPG   134.19K   118 downloads

And here is a close-up on the legend.
 2.JPG   27.33K   94 downloads

As always, I welcome any criticism

Thanks!

[Dennis McClendon]

I'm bothered by the white halos on the university labels. I think they could both be pure white, or the university fills could be made less dark so that black or dark colored labels would work.

Sometimes it takes some fiddling to get collections of logos to look like they have similar prominence, and you can't rely on a simplistic size parameter to make them equal. One way I sometimes deal with logos of different sizes and shapes is to give them white blocks to occupy in a khaki ground:

[DaveB]

I agree with Dennis about the university labels. I also have a little trouble reading the white labels on dark gray/black for the shopping center names. I wonder if it would help if those were bolded?
Also, if the images show actual size I can't really see the "highway intersection" symbol (are highway intersections even needed? what is their purpose in this context?).
Finally, if the images are actual size I can't even read the fine print in the legend.

[David Fletcher]

I changed the university labels, thanks for the tip. In response to the question about the map's size, it is actually much larger than the picture I uploaded. I shrunk it down so that it would be a small enough file to upload to the forum.

Here is a more zoomed in picture, 50% of the map's actual size.
 1.JPG   196.5K   85 downloads

Eventually, this map will be printed poster size. It is a base map that will be used for many different maps. The highway intersections were included to show the location of highway access points in relation to listings that our commercial agents (I work at a real estate company) have found for our customers.

As for the retail layer, I'm still working with it. Thanks for the example and if others have experience with adding retail logos to maps, I would love to hear how you went about doing so, if you care to share.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

[DaveB]

Ah. That's better. The university color and label look much better, too.

[GeoEvan]

Just a tip for posting on the web (e.g. here): maps will look cleaner, without the gooey compression artifacts in the solid colored areas, if you save it as a PNG instead of a JPG. The only downside is that PNG might have a larger file size if the map contains a lot of raster data (but the size is usually still manageable).

This also applies for print if you're submitting a raster export (e.g. JPG, PNG) rather than the actual vector lines (e.g. as an SVG file or GIS project).