This week's Cartography lab introduced us to the use of proportional symbols to communicate map data. As seen in the above two maps, the size of the symbol represents the value of interest. This method is an intuitive way to communicate information; very little interpretation needs to be done by the viewer to see France's wine consumption is higher than Finland's. A potential downside, however, is the difficulty of discerning the relative sizes of similar values. France, Italy and Germany feature similarly sized symbols, for example. If these three symbols were further apart, discerning their relation would be even more difficult. We may also run into the difficulty of an overcrowding of symbols; in the second map I was forced to move most of the symbols away from their country's center to allow for legibility.
The first map features a legend that is fairly worthless. I would have spent some extra time working with it, but the point of the initial lab was more experimental in nature. Leaving the symbology unclassed allows a direct representation of wine consumption to symbol size. The second map was completed in Adobe Illustrator and proved to be more bothersome. Although I am sure it is operator error, at times Illustrator seems to have a mind of its own. On more than one occasion I had to deal with disappearing or spontaneously moved symbols. On the other hand, we did learn how to create the circular text seen above.
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