Lake Map

Lab Map

"The purpose of this activity is to increase familiarity with Adobe Illustrator CC and applying the five essentials of map design (figure-ground, legibility, clarity, balance, visual hierarchy) to the production of an artistic reference map of a body of water. This project is designed to provide you, the cartographer, with a lot of artistic freedom. Creativity is encouraged!"

This exercise took the skills learned working on the reference map and applied them to a more creative setting. A body of water with bathymetric contour lines had to be mapped with the 5 essentials of map design. However, I could choose which body of water to map, as well as the method to produce the final map. 

 I decided to map Little Round Lake in Hayward, Wisconsin. My family and I have gone on vacation there multiple times during past summers, and I have many fond memories of the surrounding area. To start, I obtained a bathymetric lake map from the DNR’s website. I traced the water contours in Adobe Illustrator, and decided to discard other features on the DNR map because of visual hierarchy purposes (hence the lack of roads, marshes, etc. from final map). Seeking additional features to create a visually pleasing product, I tested using snippets taken from Google Earth as a background; this however proved to be too troublesome and time consuming to align these with the lake contours. I then decided on using additional land contours as a background. These would emphasize the lake’s shape and could be obtained in variety of contrasting colors. I obtained the land contours from Andy Woodruff’s contourwebsite. After importing them into Illustrator, I had to slightly adjust the land contours in both size and alignment to not overlap the lake. At this point, I also labeled the general locations of the two nearby lakes without drawing the lakes in, as I believe that the land contours do a well enough job of outlining them. This also avoids cluttering the map with features which are not the focus, while still giving the viewer additional information about the surrounding area. 

This exercise helped to teach me the more creative aspects of map making. Most importantly, I found that using the right background can really make the mapped features pop and produce a very nice end product. 

Future Changes:

- If I had more time in the future, it could be interesting to add the contours in for the other lakes shown in the map.