Week11 Cart - Dots are easier with a paint brush!

Dot mapping has a long history.  It is best performed by hand without the use of a computer. They said it back then and I will say it now, that is it still true.  I'm older than the computer, they knew what they were talking about.  This time it wasn't the dots that were the issue, although mine are too small. It was preparing the base map in illustrator which caused me to lose time (much time).

It was an attempt to show the housing units in 15 southern counties in Florida.  Each dot represents 5790 housing units.  Much of the area is covered by inhabitable marshland.  Our placement did not account for federal lands, state parks, industrial areas or other areas not permitting housing.   Using the 2000 census information was fairly straightforward. 

Looks like my map did not translate very well to the blog. 

Here's a description of the process.

Process Summary

·       Started Illustrator, made a copy of the base map before making changes. 

·       Studied layer structure of map. Created separate layers for north arrow, Had no clue how to begin the map part. Chose to do a housing unit map.

·       Based on data chose 5790 as the unit measure for the dot.  Determined the number of dots for each county:  Manatee 24, Hardee 2 , Highlands 8, St Lucie 16, Martin 11, Palm Beach 96, Broward 128, Miami-Dade 147, Monroe 9, Collier 25, Hendry 2, Lee 42, Charlotte 14, Desota 2, Sarasota 31.    This was the easy part. I used excel & made several extra columns to determine later that they were already in the chart just not labeled very clear.

·       I zoomed in on the southern zone to determine the livable areas, with the water layers turned on.  Wanted to put a small map of Florida with the highlighted counties, then do the dot map on an enlarged area of the southern counties.  Ambitions were high. 

·       Started over 3 times in various stages of data disappearing (counties, water, etc.) 

·       My dot size was 0.7 which turned out to be too small with the enlargement I was able to create.  I put the dots in a separate layer, sub layered by county to hold their individual dot count.  I was able to make a 10 count & 20 count dot template which I copy/pasted into the counties. This made counting the dots much quicker & was actually the quickest portion of the lab. (The base map eventually turned out ok).  I lost the water layers which were carefully lassoed into groups and moved to the base map.  It would have been best if the marshes could have shown up.

·       In the process, the scale became invisible and lost its fill/stroke.  It took nearly to the end to figure this out.

·       Have had enormous challenges with Illustrator.  I’d like to bury the inventor of it who forgot to show the rest of us how to understand it.  Other than struggling to learn illustrator on the fly. This would have been an ok lab.  The final product is not as elaborate as I had attempted to produce.