Week 9: Flow Maps

For this week's lab we had to take a world map in ArcGIS, decide on its projection, and transfer the map to Adobe Illustrator to add flow arrows showing the number of people gaining legal permanent residence in the U.S. in 2007 from each continent.

After printing and rejecting several projections, I decided on Buckminster Fuller's icosahedral one (similar to gnomonic apparently) because it preserves shape well and the continents weren't tremendously distorted in size, and because I've always been intrigued by Fuller and this was my first opportunity to use an invention of his! It did however complicate my north arrow positioning, with which ArcMap did not help me. I am afraid that the north arrow in Illustrator is the result of me blindly aiming for the North Pole.

This time I found the Illustrator videos were quite helpful - having the narrator not rush the words made a big difference. As for the data, I separated arrows for Canada from the flow from the rest of North America because they were coming from two different directions. I chose not to include the GIS file of all the individual U.S. states, since I thought they would only clutter a map that does not display which states are the particular destinations of immigrants.