“Like guns and crosses, maps can be good or bad, depending on who’s holding them, who they’re aimed at, how they’re used, and why.” -Mark Monmonier
Hello and welcome to my webpage! My name is Trevor and I would like to show you some of the skill sets I've learned in my cartography class to help graphically display real world events and features in a way that clearly communicates the data to the desired audience; you. Prior to this class I had taken several geospatial science classes which mostly centered on using ArcGIS to analyze spatial data to answer questions and solve real world problems. ArcGIS is a collection of software tools, databases, analysts, remote sensing devices, and users that come together to make it the powerful analytical tool that it is. One downside to ArcGIS is it's inability to provide a visually pleasing maps that follow principles of cartographic design. Once an analysis is complete it is often up to the cartographer to show this information in the best possible manner. Where ArcGIS fails at this, Adobe Illustrator succeeds. Adobe Illustrator is often the program we take maps to clean them up for presentation. This was one of the largest and most important software skill set I learned during my cartography class. My favorite projects in this class were the campus map, typograph map, and the final mapping project. The campus map was important because i learned how to create and manage a geodatabase which is simply put a way to manage spatial data in ArcMap and can be used to digitize features from an existing map. The typograph map was a hassle to create but it really brought my Adobe Illustrator skills up to par and turned out to be aesthetically pleasing map. The final mapping project allowed for a inequality to be visualized in a way that previous geospatial science classes didn't teach the skill sets for The final product resulted in a aesthetic map reminiscent of a Pollock painting.