Cartography Week 2: Typography

 For this assignment, we created a simple map of Florida to explore principles of typography and labeling. We learned how to label point features (cities), line features (rivers), and polygon features (swamps) using the Label tool in ArcGIS Pro. We also converted labels to annotations and practiced editing, moving, and resizing annotations.

I labeled cities with a sans serif font (Century Gothic) and geographic features with a serif font (Bodoni MT) to show the difference between cultural and natural features. I used only these two fonts for the rest of my map text, so all the text on the map looks varied but cohesive. I represented all my cities with a red dot except for Tallahassee, for which I used a yellow star and a larger font size to show that it is the capital. For the rivers, I made the labeled rivers a darker blue than the unlabeled ones to show that they were more important and to clarify exactly which river the label referenced. Since Okefenokee Swamp was too small to put its label inside its area, I treated it as a point and placed the label above and to the right of the swamp. However, I wasn’t sure if it would be clear where the swamp was, so I added a leader line. 

The biggest challenge in this lab was the annotations, which I had never used before. When I created the annotation from the FloridaLakesSwamps layer, the annotation text was very, very tiny, and when I tried to resize the annotations, it told me the spatial index grid size was invalid. After much frustration and some googling, I used the Update Annotation Reference Scale tool to solve this. After the same error prevented me from moving or editing the annotation, I figured out that I had to delete the spatial index entirely to make those changes. 

Overall, typography in ArcGIS Pro is harder than I expected, but I'm sure it will become easier with practice.