Lab 2: Where is Waldo?

First, Lab 2 is not an exercise from the "Where's Waldo" look-and-find books or an attempt to create a map pinpointing Waldo, FL. It's more about avoiding a "Where's Waldo" map, in other words, reducing the cognitive load required to convey information using maps or just basic cartographic skills.

Who will use this map?

Consider this short fictitious Q/A session between a UWF Visitor and a Student Cartographer. Although a brief exchange, it is packed with information that a map showing UWF's location should contain:

• UWF Visitor: Where is University of West Florida (UWF)?
• Student Cartographer: It is located in Pensacola, FL.
• UWF Visitor: I have heard of Pensacola, FL but where exactly is that?
• Student Cartographer: In Escambia County, Florida.
• UWF Visitor: That's in South Florida right?
• Student Cartographer: No, it is the westernmost Florida county. You know where... Tell you what, let us create a map that pinpoints UWF's location.

What is the purpose of the map?

For this map, the goal for the Student Cartographer is to create a stand-alone map that provides the UWF Visitor with the necessary information to orient themselves spatially from either their current location or from some well-known geographical feature. In this context a well-known feature may include natural or manmade features, like bodies of water, roadways, and jurisdictional boundaries.

Ok, guess who the Student Cartographer is? — That is right, me!

Fortunately, the Lab provides all the necessary instructions and information needed to create this map; it's just a matter of using ArcGIS Pro and arranging the information in a useful manner.

Final Outcome

These are the challenges and lessons learned,

• Setting the map's coordinate system: Similar to another student's experience, ArcGIS Pro did not want to display Escambia County's boundary extent in decimal degrees. In a few clicks, it became evident that the custom FGDL Albers coordinate system was likely the problem. Once the map's coordinate system was changed to the subject location, Florida State Plane (EPSG:2883), things began to work as expected.
  
• Escambia County clearly best fits on a portrait-oriented document. It does have some challenges given its hourglass shape. Things would have been much easier to present had it not been for those barrier islands, and to make matters even worse, the UWF Campus is located in the southeastern part of the County. This made it difficult to include the other map document items and best center the campus on the document.
• Navigating element properties difficult at first but with practice changing the color, fonts, and other features became second nature.
  

Making a couple of trade-offs, it was decided to move Escambia County to the top, left corner as much as possible and fit the logo, legend, and inset map to the upper, right corner.

Color choices followed the guidance in the Lab. An effort was made to adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but some of the color choices do not fully meet the contrast ratio.

After spending some time grouping and arranging different map components, and then rearranging them, the final map...