Cartograms

These are cartograms of world GDP for the year 2004. On top is a non continuous cartogram that was created in ArcMap and finished in Adobe Illustrator for the legend creation.
The bottom map is a continuous cartogram was created wholly in ArcMap as the cartogram script creates a shapefile which allows easy insertion of a legend.

Freehand Dot Map

Roughly 1500 dots were manually added using Adobe Illustrator to a map of Florida representing housing unit density. Each dot represents 4 units of density because the lowest density was around 4 units per square mile.

The highest density areas really became solid color as there was not enough room to fit all dots in a coalesced manner. If the ratio was increased then low density counties would not get a dot even though they do have housing density. If the dots were made smaller then they were barely visible. A compromise was made to make the dots .5 points and use a color that was visible to try and offset the problems. This worked to a point but still not perfect in my estimation.

Proportional Circle Map

This map portrays wine consumption in Europe for the year 2005 using proportional circles. The map was created in ArcView and then brought into Adobe Illustrator for editing and the addition of the proportional circles. They were sized using standard methods for circle size using the formula: symbol size= (max symbol size) * (value/max value). There were 5 classifications based on the grouping of consumption in 5 groups in a rough natural break format. There was a thought to add country names but the map was already busy. Maybe a second inset map could have been added to identify the countries.

GrayScale Population Change Map

This is a grayscale map of the change in US population from the 1990 to 2000 US Census.
Population change was calculated from raw population totals for 1990 and 2000 census. These were then categorized by US Census division and then averaged using all states in each division. The 9 divisions were then converted into 5 roughly equal intervals. Thus allowing for easy comprehension of the map.
The map was created in Adobe Illustrator using the previously posted population change map created using a provided shapefile. All colors were removed first then gray scale added to create the map to allow for a correct consistent shading of each interval.
Intervals are comprised of two US Census divisions which have a similar percent change (within 1 or 2 percentage points) except for the final one which has one large division. This avoids the excessive clutter of each division having its own interval.

Chloropleth Map

This is a map of population change for the United States including Alaska and Hawaii.
The North American Lambert Conformal Conic projection used was for a couple of reasons. First, this projection generally preserves shape and area which is what this map is trying to convey being a chloropleth map which shows the visual impact of population change by state. Also, the projection works well for the North American continent as Alaska appears to be roughly 2.5 times the size of Texas which is close to the true areal difference between the two states.
Layout seemed balanced but the scale of Alaska and Hawaii could have been changed so as to fit them closer to the continental United States. If this was done then all states should have been re-sized based on population change weighted to total population of each state thus revealing the true impact of population change for each state and the country as a whole.

Map Composition

Map of the Hispanic percentage of population in the southern half of Florida with an arrangement of various provided map items.

Florida Keys (Map Lettering) Lab

Marathon Florida and surrounding keys. Labeling was done taking into consideration the complicated nature of the map. There were several map classes with many items to label in a relatively small area.