Typography

The lab assignment for Module 2 covered the important subject of typography and its application in cartography. It was necessary to add emphasis or convey a type of hierarchical relationship for a feature using both font-size and style. In the lab to denote a city as a County seat its font was slightly larger than the other non-County seat major cities. To accomplish this task it was necessary to create label classes using the "FEATURE" attribute as a discriminator value. Similar to symbolizing a feature based off of a unique value, a simple SQL statement was creates so the specified label was applied to only those features.

Once the skill was solidified by the labs step-by-step instructions it required a map utilizing the newly acquired skills. Seeking at least carte blanche changes to the map, it was decided to:

1. Most of the populated city features have signification separation except for those found in South Florida. Those along the east coast from West Palm Beach to Miami are concentrated such that the labels are difficult to read without an offset. To avoid any confusion as to which label belongs to which point feature the offset labels included a leader.
2. The river labels where converted to an annotation and in some instances simplified and placed differently than the original placement when converting the labels to annotation. These include the Withlacochee River, Suwanee River and Santa Fe River.
3. Since the swamp and marshes are hydrological features but may not represent a water body its symbology and label was set to a green and filled with a glyph which best represents that feature. Since these are hydrological features their labels are italicized to ensure a “flowing” effect. I spent some time symbolizing this feature and finally discovered why. Since the Lake Okeechobee is not shown is somewhat deceiving.
4. The symbol for the State’s capital, Tallahassee, is denoted using large orange start and the label is larger than the County seat cities to emphasizes it import ants or hierarchical aspect to the other labeled cities.