British Columbia’s Major Towns, Cities, and Landforms

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Adobe Illustrator / Cartography

For my third week of Cartography, I have been tasked to create a reference map of the major towns, cities, and landforms of my beloved province - British Columbia. The purpose of this assignment is to create adequate visual hierarchies of symbols and to echo this hierarchy through labelling choices.

This week, I have made a reference map of the major towns, cities, and landforms of British Columbia. A key challenge that I faced was fitting all the necessary labels without compromising the map's visual communication through congestion and overlapping labels.

HERE ARE SOME SKILLS I PICKED UP ALONG THE WAY:

  • Designed a reference map of BC's towns, cities and physical landforms using cartographic conventions and Adobe Illustrator software
  • Deployed halos to keep labels legible and adequately positioned in terms of visual hierarchy
  • Created proportional symbols to reflect relative population sizes from largest to smallest cities

HERE ARE SOME CARTOGRAPHIC CONVENTIONS CONCERNING TYPE AND TEXT PLACEMENTS:

  • Feature labels should be exaggerated to show the complete extent and orientation of the feature
  • Coastal and terrestrial features can be differentiated by labelling coastal features to one side of a symbol, while labeling terrestrial features to another side
  • Type sizes should never go below size six (even this seemed a bit small to me!)
  • Labels of the same feature should always be made with the same type family, while size may be used to show hierarchy

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