Cartography Week 7 - Chorpleth Maps

Here are my two maps for this week's assignment.    I feel much more comfortable with the layers aspect of Illustrator now.   Next week I am going to really try to concentrate on some of the design features of Illustrator to make my maps a little less plain.

Here is my Process Summary for this week's lab:

Process Summary

1.        Copied the data from the R: Drive to my S: Drive

2.       Started ArcMap

3.       Added the state_pop shape file

4.       I used the PROJECT tool to change to North_America_Albers_Equal_Area_Conic

5.       Changed the symbology to “Quantities” and chose a graduated color scheme

6.       I looked at the natural breaks.  Whenever I tried to adjust the breaks then it said that the classification was “Manual” rather that natural breaks.   So I left this at the 5 natural breaks it recommended.

7.       I set up my layers including breaking our Alaska and Hawaii to their own layer as well as the continental US.   Next I will get the scale bar to work with the continental US

8.       I really feel like I have become more familiar with Illustrator over the last couple of weeks.   It seems like making sure you have your layers set up really simplifies things.

9.       Now starting Part 2

10.   Opened Excel and the tab.xls file

11.   Set up a column called Population change and set the formula to =C2-D2

12.   Set up a column called Percent change and set the formula to =F2/D2

13.   Changed this column to a percentage

14.   Next I copied the data to a new tab and totaled my state values based on the region for the gray scale map.   These are my results:

New England	5.4%
Middle Atlantic	5.5%
East North Central	7.5%
West North Central	8.9%
South Atlantic	18.8%
East South Central	12.2%
West South Central	17.8%
Mountain	33.0%
Pacific	15.1%

15.   First I worked on my Deliverable 1 (Color).   I made sure to move the colors in the legend together like the text recommended.

16.   Since it also had negative values, I also used the word “to” instead of dashes.

17.   I made sure to note that Alaska and Hawaii were NOT to scale

18.   I made sure to include all of my required map elements

19.   I copied this project over to start my gray scale map

20.   I consulted Color Brewer and it suggested these five colors for a black and white system:

21.  

22.   I actually pasted that screen shot into my map and used the eyedrop tool to get the colors for each level

23.   I exported both my maps to JPG and created my blog post

24.   Updated all deliverables to dropbox

25.   I feel like I am comfortable with the layers aspect of illustrator now, and now I want to start working on the tools in Illustrator that will make my maps look a little less “plain”