Superior Hiking Trail - Critique 5

The Superior Hiking Trail is listed as one of the best hiking trails in the country.  It is over 275 miles long and extends from Duluth to the Canadian border.  This is the official map of the Superior Hiking Trail.  The first thing I notice is that it is not a color map, so this makes it tougher to see the figure-ground.  The darker gray of the land is visible though over the stark white of Lake Superior.  The legibility is good even with all the labels I am still able to read all of them.  Clarity is also surprisingly good with so many labels.  It appears that cities are in all caps and state parks are bolded.  Rivers are labeled smaller and are on the left side of the map.  I also like how they included an image of the location of this trail in Minnesota.  Balance is good in this map and the locations of labels are consistent.  Overall I think this is a well thought out map that shows mostly what you would need to know to hike the trail.  If they included locations of trail heads and campgrounds that would improve the map.

Lutsen Mountain Trail Map- Critique 1

This is a map of Lutsten Mountains Ski and Snowboard Resort.  I went here a couple of years ago with my friends family on vacation.  This map uses a landscape panorama map format, which Austrian painter Heinrich Berann made famous in the 1900s.  This map has pretty good figure-ground, using the natural colors based on a realistic image of what the mountains look like.  The legibility of the map is ok.  There are some smaller paragraphs of wording on the sides and in some of the legends, but I feel the cartographer did the best with the space he had available.  Also, the trail map is easier to read when you are holding a hard copy of it, not just looking off of a computer screen.  The Clarity of the map is consistent with the quality of the rest of the map.  There are good borders on the different images in the map and they do not overlap over anything important.  Balance is very good on this map.  The way it is layed out works well with what it is mapping.  There are images of each seperate mountain, the lodge area, and one big image encompassing all of them.  This map's visual hierarchy combines all of the other essentials of map design and overall I beleive this is a quality map based on how much needed to be mapped. 

Lanesboro, Minnesota Map- exercise 5

dorndd_exercise5, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

This was probably my favorite assignment that we did this semester.  To make this map of my hometown I first used ArcGis to make a basemap, which I then dropped into Adobe Illustrator.  Once I had the base map in Illustrator I then used the pen tool to trace the roads, rivers, parks, exedra throughout Lanesboro.  One neat tool that I discovered was the smoother tool, which allowed me to make my roads not as blocky and more flowing.  After finishing all of the features I then made a green rectangle that covered the entire document and deleted the base map.  This was the first project where we were in charge of making the map basically from scratch.  It was challenging but I found it very fun to be able to create something like this.  This exercise also greatly expanded my Adobe Illustrator knowledge and allowed me more artistic freedom for my map.