My story map Project

GIS 4043 Lab 2 Cartography 

 Well, where do I even begin?

At the beginning I suppose.. 

In the beginning of this assignment I immediately realized that there would be much less hand holding when it pertained items that were covered in last week's Module 1 such as file creation, filepath locations, folder setup, etc.. 

I went back a couple of times and looked at how I had structured my previous folders to help me correctly store the data for this module. 

Opening the catalog view and extracting the metadata for the assignment part one was not too hard. 
I did however run into a question about the cell that asked for the coordinate systems used in each shapefile. 

My answer for those was "GCS_North_American_1983_HARN using Albers conical Equal Area Projection" because even though technically Albers Conical Equal Area itself is not a coordinate system, that's was was listed in the projected coordinate system in the Metadata. 

Albers is a mathematical conversion applied to a coordinate system to take it from curved to flat. 

The next issue I had became a significant hurdle for me. On Step 11 you are instructed to convert the extents of EscBoundary to degrees for the Process summary Q3. 

No matter what I did to follow the directions as perfectly as I could, when I would attempt to selected EscBoundary in the Extent frame under properties, the program would not select it nor change to degrees. 

Eventually I managed to solve the problem (probably dumb luck) by going into general of the properties window and changing the display units to decimal degrees, this enabled me to go back into extent and was finally able to use degrees as a drop down that showed the immediate degrees conversion I was needing. 

After that I took it very slowly, almost at a standstill because I was afraid of missing something. 

The only thing I'm not happy about with my final product, is the World Imagery layer (At the very bottom of my drawing order, still has the names of Ferry Pass and Some of the other cities behind my labels. 
I spent a lot of time trying to remove those but I think I would have to turn off the world imagery view all together which I did not like. 

I may get counted off for it but Its better than nothing at all I suppose. 

Although I may not think my Exported file of the map isn't going to win any contests any time soon, I feel as though it really directs your attention to the most important information first, which is the Title(purpose of the map), Legend (what you're looking for) and the "Crown Jewel" so to say. 

The Graduation Cap colored with a rich purple against a soft light green background felt really good to look at. 

The red from the interstate made it difficult to land on a good color and symbol for the cities but we got there. 

The Florida overview map doesn't distract you from what you're really wanting to know, but its there just incase with a bright red county showing Escambia, which is exactly what I think it should do. 

I made the Font a little larger for the Title because I really wanted it to be the first thing you see. 

It stands out so well against the beautiful blue of the Gulf. The same can be said for the Scale,  and the North Arrow though it is placed over the neighboring county of Santa Rosa. (I live in Okaloosa County).

The color for the other counties was such a large portion of the layout view, that I did not want it to be grey. Grey would have made the entire thing boring and dull. So a soft earthy tone of tan seemed to take a back seat to everything else. 

I tucked the cartographer name, date, and source in the bottom right which felt clean. Same for the UWF Logo at the top left. to be frank, the top left was the only place really left for it to go. 

All in all I learned a ton in this module and was sorely unprepared for how long it would take me. 
Therefore I would recommend a total of 9-10 hours just on the Lab itself. 

-Dwight