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.

Africa Political Map- exercise 2

dorndd_exercise2, a photo by DakotaDorn on Flickr.

For this exercise I was tasked on creating a political map of Africa that included all country labels, as well as labels for main terrain features.  Some examples of those features are rivers, lakes, mountains, and gulfs. With that we also had to use the five fundamentals of map design to make an ascetically pleasing map.  Finding colors that went well together for both the countries and for the figure-ground presented a challenge.  Also, some of the labels were especially tricky to place and required a significant amount of thought and trial and error.