Week 5: South/Central Florida's Hispanic Population, in Adobe Illustrator

This week's assignment was to take a ready-made map in Adobe Illustrator and rearrange the items so that the information was displayed better. We also had to add a north arrow and a neatline. You can see the original on the far left; the one on the right is mine after my changes.

I had a lot of trouble with this assignment and I'm not perfectly satisfied with the end result, though I do think it is an improvement. It took me ages to get the legend in the right place relative to the south/central map of counties. I admit I did not see the videos before getting the map done as I kept getting error messages when I tried (in fact AFTER uploading the final image to this blog I tried one more time and lo and behold, this time the first video worked) - I have been consulting a book on Adobe (and various Help messages on their website) .

I removed the extra zeroes that were originally in the legend percent figures, as they are statistically meaningless as well as confusing to the reader. I used the Kuler tool to find a "swatch" of five colors, but I could not find a Kuler swatch that simply went from light to dark and the one that was closest to what I wanted had two reds that I could not distinguish once they were on the map, so I changed one of the colors in the five-color range to make the differences clearer.

I didn't like any of the arrows that Adobe offers - importing a graceful one would be better - so I compromised by thinning one of their arrows once it was on the screen. I couldn't do anything about the scale bar, which looks too big and clumsy - and is now equidistant from the small-scale and the large-scale Florida map - but I had to let it stand. Maybe when I have better skills I'll be able to fix that! In a word - Phew. I'm glad to have this lab over.