About: The goal for this class project was to learn the cartographic principles of typography and symbolization, as well as to familiarize ourselves with Illustrator. The assignment required us to label every country in Africa, all national capitals, about 50 other cities throughout the continent, major rivers and several bodies of water in the region. Since this was a political map, we also needed to figure out a way to appropriately display disputed territories.
Process: The map was first constructed in ArcGIS, including the labelling of countries, cities and rivers. Arc’s label generator isn’t great, especially with all of the labels on this map. After exporting the map to Illustrator, the bulk of the work was repositioning and resizing labels. The visual hierarchy I was trying to create with the labels in decreasing order of importance was capital cities, other cities, and countries/rivers. To do this I used different saturations, sizes, cases, kearning and leading for the labels. I also had to tilt and curve many of the labels in order to prevent labels from becoming jumbled or crossing or otherwise decreasing their legibility. I also simplified and smoothed all of the rivers in order to make them look more natural and less like a series of points connected by straight lines.
Completed October 2015